Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Last year, Justin Ernest noticed a massive gap in how venture capital was working: Family offices and smaller institutional investors were eager to invest in the fastest-growing AI companies but couldn’t get access to those cap tables.  Having spent over five years at Playground Global investing in deep tech and helping lead fundraising, Ernest was confident his connections to both investors and founders would allow him to bridge that gap. Instead of launching a formal VC fund, a process he says takes new managers anywhere from 12 to 18 months, Ernest used his network to secure allocations of stock in…

The next phase of the AI race is on.With OpenAI’s Monday confidential S-1 filing following in the footsteps of Antrhopic’s, the two premiere AI labs are now officially in the IPO race. SpaceX, which includes Elon Musk’s xAI, has a head start, and goes public later this week.While OpenAI left the door open on its timing, warning that “it may be a while” before it actually publicly lists its shares, the AI labs are moving from an era of closed-door tinkering as a private companies into the world of public earnings calls, financial disclosures, and the regulation that comes with…

As Salesforce begins another round of layoffs, the company’s standard severance plan appears to offer employees a softer landing than many of its Big Tech peers.Internal documents reviewed by Business Insider show that eligible U.S. workers can receive up to 30 weeks of severance, a package that appears more generous than those recently offered by companies including Oracle, Amazon, and Block.Salesforce on Monday started notifying employees about layoffs, according to people familiar with the matter and a regulatory notice in California. The layoffs come amid concerns that AI tools and agents could replace traditional software, including the company’s main customer…

Two years and a $250 million lawsuit later, Apple’s AI Siri revamp is on its way to your phones and laptops and even your mixed reality headset, if you happen to be one of like three people who actually uses the Apple Vision Pro. Apple revealed a slew of new information at Monday’s WWDC keynote about these long-awaited, AI-powered updates that can take advantage of the fact that our hardware is supposedly “built for Apple Intelligence.” To be honest, it’s hard for AI to impress me enough that I’ll use it in my day-to-day life. I still don’t trust LLMs…

Anthropic has released Claude Fable 5, the first publicly available version of its closely watched Mythos model. What can Fable actually do? All kinds of things, it turns out. Ethan Mollick, a notable AI researcher and University of Pennsylvania scholar, has been playing around with the model and seems to be having a lot of fun. In his testing, Fable consistently “outperformed basically every other public model I have used by a considerable margin,” Mollick wrote Tuesday on his Substack. He added that it was “capable across many problems and produced some startling results — it would work up to…

The AI boom has been built on a basic assumption: Bigger models are more powerful, and the most powerful models win. Now, the industry is about to learn what happens if that assumption starts to break.   Mounting costs have already pressured users to give smaller and cheaper models a second look. This cost-conscious model-shopping is new and it’s unclear how it will affect the industry, but the impact is likely to be significant.  One prediction, laid out best by Coinbase co-founder Brian Armstrong, is that it will result in the vast majority of tasks shifting to cheaper models.  “[D]emand for intelligence is near infinite, but 80% of workloads will be running on 99% cheaper models within 12-18 months,” Armstrong wrote…

Anthropic is finally willing to give you Mythos, but it comes with some safeguard strings attached.On Tuesday, Anthropic said it was releasing a “Mythos-class” model called Claude Fable 5, but with safeguards so significant that it gave the model a different name.”Without safeguards, Fable 5’s capabilities in areas like cybersecurity could be misused to cause serious damage,” Anthropic said in its announcement.The safeguards, which mean some queries on certain topics will instead be ported to Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 model, are initially tuned to be more conservative. The safeguards are triggered when Fable 5 detects requests concerning cybersecurity, biology and chemistry,…

Apple’s WWDC 2026 event kicked off yesterday at Apple Park, starting a week packed with reveals about Siri AI, iOS 27, Apple Intelligence, and more, along with developer events and demos as Apple looks to reassert itself with users and developers who haven’t been impressed with their releases within the wildly competitive AI space. It also marks CEO Tim Cook’s last WWCD with the company, after announcing he’s handing things off to Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering John Ternus on September 1. Did they succeed? Keep tabs on this page, and the rest of our ongoing coverage, to find…

Apple’s new AI wants to fix your bad passwords.At its Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, Apple said its Passwords app will soon be able to update eligible weak or compromised passwords.”Now, you can automatically update eligible accounts to strong passwords with just a tap,” Beth Dakin, a senior manager on the engineering team for Apple’s browser app, Safari, said during the event.She said that the system would “agentically take action on your behalf.”Apple already alerts users when a saved password is weak, reused, or may have been exposed in a data breach. The coming feature goes a step further, Apple…

Anthropic is bringing its most powerful AI model to the general public for the first time, but it’s doing it with guardrails.  On Tuesday, the AI firm launched Claude Fable 5, the first publicly available version of its Mythos model. Anthropic says Fable 5 excels at software engineering, knowledge work, and vision, but it comes with hard safety limits. In high-risk areas like cybersecurity, biology, chemistry, and distillation, the model blocks responses and falls back to Claude Opus 4.8. Launched as a preview in April, Mythos was initially limited to a handful of partners due to cybersecurity concerns. Last week,…