Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Noise-canceling headphones continue to one-up each other, immersing listeners in near-dizzying layers of sonic solitude. But innovation comes at a cost, and not everyone can afford ever-rising prices from top brands. Thankfully, Soundcore (as it often does) has a solution for budget buyers who want to share in the spoils, courtesy of its new Space 2 headphones.As a tech writer and audio reviewer for over a decade, I’ve tried hundreds of headphones. While the active noise cancellation (ANC) on budget models has gotten increasingly good, the Soundcore Space 2 deliver the best ANC I’ve ever encountered at this price point.…

Elon Musk took a moment during Tesla’s earnings call on Wednesday to thank three companies that have little to do with traditional automaking.Musk praised Samsung and TSMC during the call, and then turned to another company that manufactures semiconductor chips. “I’d also like to thank Micron for giving us a memory allocation,” he said. “They’ve got to make some very tough decisions on memory allocation.”It was perhaps the most 2026 moment of the call.Micron and Samsung are two of the world’s largest manufacturers of DRAM, the short-term memory that allows computers to rapidly access and process data. The chips have…

Weeks after OpenAI rolled out a new family of conversational models and updated ChatGPT’s voice mode, rival Anthropic is making its move to make Claude more voice-friendly with a new update. The company said Thursday that users can choose between Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku models. Claude’s voice mode, which was released last year and powered by the Haiku model, provided quick responses, but wasn’t well suited for complex work. The company said that with the new update, voice mode picks the last model people used in the text chat and uses its fastest version by default. Anthropic said that the…

Hackers are increasingly using AI to launch attacks on a massive scale, with email emerging as a primary target. AI can quickly aggregate personal information — such as information about co-workers, active projects, and recent travel itineraries — allowing bad actors to instantly craft convincing messages that look authentic. Last year, former Google security executives Cy Khormaee and Ryan Luo, who previously worked on developing safe browsing technology and reCAPTCHA, teamed up to launch AegisAI, a startup that uses AI agents to stomp out these threats, known as spear phishing. With a decade of experience preventing email hacks, the AegisAI…

As companies make rounds of job cuts and double down on AI spend, Google’s parent company Alphabet is expanding its workforce.Alphabet reported blockbuster second-quarter earnings, with revenue climbing 24% year over year to $119.8 billion. The company revealed in its earnings report that it increased head count by 11,830 employees, from 187,103 to 198,933, between June 30, 2025 and June 30, 2026.The chart below shows how Alphabet’s workforce has grown from the end of the first quarter of 2025 through the end of the second quarter of 2026. The biggest jump in Alphabet’s head count of the last couple of…

Something has to change, right?Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok have dominated the social media landscape for years. As AI infiltrates every platform — and many corners of our lives — new social media founders, apps, and internet behaviors are emerging.From vibe coding to cultural shifts shaping how people want to connect, it’s a perfect storm for founders to experiment with social media.AI has “essentially brought down the cost of making anything,” Amy Wu Martin, a partner at Menlo Ventures, told Business Insider.Menlo is an investor in Anthropic, whose product Claude Code has radically changed the product-building pipeline for startups.”If you want…

TikTok is racing to cash in on the micro-drama craze.The company has been quietly testing a paid short-drama app in the US called LimeShorts since March, Business Insider has learned.Micro dramas, also called “verticals,” are soap-opera style series split into dozens of clips of around one to five minutes each.Like other micro-drama apps, including market leaders ReelShort and DramaBox, LimeShorts operates on a “freemium” model, where users get the first few episodes of a show for free before hitting a paywall. Viewers can pay $20 a week or $200 a year for full access to titles, or unlock individual episodes…

AMD is making a bet about the future of AI: one chip shouldn’t rule them all.CEO Lisa Su announced Thursday that AMD is teaming up with chip startup Cerebras on a new approach to AI inference, which is the process of generating responses from AI models.Increasingly, chipmakers are pursuing “disaggregated inference,” which splits workloads across different types of hardware. AMD’s partnership with Cerebras shows the company is betting big on this approach.Traditionally, the same hardware handled both processing a prompt and generating an answer. AMD argues those are fundamentally different jobs. Helios, its latest server system, is designed to process…

Runway no longer wants to be just another AI model company. It wants to become the infrastructure layer for generative media. On Thursday, the startup launched Runway Media Router through Runway Dev, its developer platform, released earlier this month, that provides API access to a growing roster of third-party image, video, and audio models alongside Runway’s own.  The Media Router is a tool that automatically selects the best image, video, or audio generation model for a request based on whether a developer prioritizes quality, speed, or cost. While model routers have become increasingly common in the world of large language…

OpenAI said today it is making ChatGPT Health, a feature that helps users with health-related queries, available to all U.S.-based users over 18 across all plans. The announcement comes a day after a Florida-based pastor sued the company for giving a near-fatal suggestion not to consult a doctor. The company started testing the feature through a dedicated hub earlier in January, allowing users to integrate data from other services and their personal information from services such as Apple Health, Function, and MyFitnessPal. At that time, OpenAI said users were asking 230 million health-related queries each week. That number has now…