Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

White House science advisor Michael Kratsios said that Moonshot, the Chinese company behind the Kimi K3, the largest available open-weight LLM, built its model by copying Anthropic’s Fable LLM while using chips that aren’t cleared for export to China. “Large-scale, covert industrial distillation aimed at stealing proprietary U.S. technology and undermining American research is unacceptable,” Kratsios wrote, amid reported discussions about banning Chinese open-weight models that have roiled the AI sector. Moonshot did not respond to questions about its training process, and Kratsios did not share more details about the sources of his allegations. Kratsios’ tweet echoed comments from Treasury…

For decades, email has been where work piles up. Now, two 23-year-old Swedes are asking: What if the inbox could start checking things off?That’s the vision behind Scape, a desktop email app that wants to do the work buried inside messages — and one that Y Combinator partner Gustaf Alströmer believes could finally pry people away from Gmail.The Stockholm startup is opening a waitlist for early access on Thursday after raising $3.2 million from Y Combinator, General Catalyst, FundersClub, and other investors, Business Insider has learned. New users will be admitted in batches.”It’s painfully obvious that AI will transform email,”…

For years, OpenAI let startups like Harvey, Legora, and others build software for lawyers on top of its foundation models — massive artificial intelligence systems trained on broad swaths of data. Now, the company, last valued at $852 billion, is making moves to court lawyers directly.OpenAI signaled that shift in June when it hired Jason Boehmig, an executive who spent more than a decade figuring out the slow, messy business of selling software to lawyers. He had left a Big Law job to start Ironclad, a company that helps corporate legal departments manage contracts.That business looks a lot sexier than…

ServiceNow, the U.S. enterprise software company known for automating workflows like IT service management and HR operations, is betting on an Indian banking software specialist to deepen its push into global financial services. The company has invested $40 million in BusinessNext, valuing the 24-year-old Indian firm at $700 million and taking a roughly 5% stake. The deal gives BusinessNext access to ServiceNow’s global sales network as the companies expand their partnership in AI for financial services. ServiceNow’s investment reflects BusinessNext’s growing profile beyond India. The profitable, Noida-based company, which generated about $32 million in revenue in its latest financial year,…

Google says its search function is not dead, it’s thriving.In a Wednesday earnings call, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said Google’s AI-powered features, such as AI Overviews and AI mode, were driving growth in search queries.Pichai said he saw this in full effect during the FIFA World Cup that started in June and wrapped up on Sunday.”As a big football fan, I was particularly excited to see search usage hit an all-time high during the World Cup this year,” he said. “This really highlights how much people turn to Google in moments that matter.”He said Google’s AI-powered search function, AI Mode,…

Google’s latest earnings call offered a familiar message: AI is driving growth, and it’s also getting more expensive.On Wednesday, Alphabet reported second-quarter revenue of $119.8 billion, up 24% from a year earlier, while Google Cloud posted another blockbuster quarter as enterprises raced to adopt AI. At the same time, executives made it clear the company is prepared to spend even more to meet surging demand.Here are the three biggest takeaways from Alphabet’s earnings.Google is spending more on AI and is willing to sacrifice marginsGoogle is prioritizing long-term AI growth over short-term profitability by doubling down on its AI buildout.The company…

On Wednesday, IBM officially reported earnings and the news was as bad as everyone knew it would be. While the 115-year-old company still generates boatloads of cash — $17.2 billion in revenue, $9.9 billion in gross profit, nearly 58% margins, and $2.2 billion in net earnings for the quarter — its results fell well short of Wall Street’s expectations. It was such a bad miss that IBM CEO Arvind Krishna and the board took an unprecedented step of warning investors ahead of time that the earnings “was worse than our expectations,” offering everyone a sneak peek. He published a “letter…

The bill for Google’s AI spending spree is coming due.Google said Wednesday that its free cash flow for the second quarter turned to negative $5.9 billion, as the company’s capital expenditures continue to rise.It marks the first time the company has reported negative free cash flow in decades, per AlphaSense, a signal of how much money Google is spending on AI data centers and hardware.Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta had already planned to spend more than $700 billion in capex this year, and that number only seems to be ticking up.Google said it now expects to spend $195 billion to…

Almost 200 Silicon Valley companies, including Proton and Y Combinator, are urging the Trump administration not to cut off access to Chinese open-weight artificial intelligence models or risk crippling the next generation of U.S. startups.On Wednesday, the newly-formed Little Tech Association sent letters to President Donald Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and others in the administration with its appeal, marking the first coordinated effort by Silicon Valley’s wider influential startup community to weigh in on one of the Trump administration’s most closely watched AI debates. At issue: whether Washington should restrict access to increasingly powerful open-weight — meaning, AI models…

Tesla stock slipped more than 4% after hours as the EV maker delivered revenue ahead of estimates but profit that missed Wall Street’s expectations.Tesla’s record Q2 vehicle deliveries helped drive $28.24 billion in revenue, topping analysts’ estimates of $26.31 billion. Quarterly profit was far below expectations, with adjusted EPS of 33 cents versus estimates of 50 cents. “Q2 was a strong quarter for our core vehicle, energy and services businesses as well as our manufacturing, infrastructure and AI initiatives,” the company said in its earnings release.The second-quarter report is Tesla’s first since Elon Musk’s other big company went public last…