Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Meta Connect 2025 — the company’s biggest conference of the year where it unveils smart glasses and VR headsets — kicks off on Wednesday night. We’re expecting the star of Meta Connect 2025 to be the company’s new AI-powered smart glasses with Ray-Ban and Oakley, but the company may have some other surprises in store regarding the Metaverse, Quest headsets, or even its broader AI ambitions. Meta says it has sold millions of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, and earlier this year, Meta unveiled its latest AI-powered smart glasses with Oakley, which were designed for athletes. Silicon Valley is leaning heavily…

Some of the newest members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine recommendations committee have questioned established medical research on immunizations and the COVID-19 pandemic.In a press release shared Monday, the CDC and Department of Health and Human Services said five new members were appointed to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP — just days ahead of a scheduled meeting that is likely to discuss the fall season’s COVID vaccines and more. “These appointments reflect the commitment of Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to transparency, evidence-based science, and diverse expertise in guiding the nation’s immunization policies,” the…

Recently, I was sitting on the couch at home with the dog when a notification from Tesla popped up on my phone. I’d gotten off the waitlist, and I could order a Robotaxi from my Silicon Valley home in San Carlos to most places in the Bay Area.The app told me there was a Robotaxi 6 minutes away, so I got a ride to my friend’s house about 2 miles up a winding hill full of parked cars.A shiny new Model Y drove up to my house, with a safety driver behind the wheel. I got in, put on a…

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Cal Raleigh broke a record held by Mickey Mantle on Tuesday night while matching another held by Ken Griffey Jr.That’s some company for a single night.The Mariners catcher hit his 55th homer of the season in the second inning against the Kansas City Royals, sending him past Mantle’s mark for a switch-hitter that had stood since 1961. Then, Raleigh hit his 56th the very next inning, matching the club record that Griffey first established in 1997 and matched himself the following year.“It just doesn’t even seem real,” said Seattle designated hitter Dominic Canzone, who on…

The next big battleground for podcasts is video — and YouTube wants to cement its dominance.On Tuesday, YouTube announced a slate of new AI products as it seeks to solidify itself as the leader in the category over competitors like Spotify or Apple.Starting next year, audio-first podcasters will be able to generate video clips for YouTube from their audio transcripts. The tool uses Google’s Veo AI technology to generate short 30-second to 60-second visuals that can either become a YouTube short or a part of a long-form video upload. The feature will initially be available to a limited set of US…

Are you a jerk? Don’t expect to ask your chatbot and get an honest answer.Anyone who has used bots like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude knows they can lean a little … well, suck-uppy. They’re “sychophants.” They tell you what you want to hear.Even OpenAI’s Sam Altman acknowledged the issue with the latest iteration of ChatGPT, which supposedly was tuned to be less of a yes man. Now, a study by university researchers is using one of the key barometers of knowing-if-you’re-a-jerk: Reddit’s “Am I the Asshole” page — where people post stories good and bad, and pose the age-old question…

For years, Big Tech CEOs have touted visions of AI agents that can autonomously use software applications to complete tasks for people. But take today’s consumer AI agents out for a spin, whether it’s OpenAI’s ChatGPT Agent or Perplexity’s Comet, and you’ll quickly realize how limited the technology still is. Making AI agents more robust may take a new set of techniques that the industry is still discovering. One of those techniques is carefully simulating workspaces where agents can be trained on multi-step tasks — known as reinforcement learning (RL) environments. Similarly to how labeled datasets powered the last wave…

Harjot Gill was running FluxNinja, an observability startup he co-founded several years after selling his first startup Netsil to Nutanix in 2018, when he noticed a curious trend.   “We had a team of remote engineers who were starting to adopt AI code generation on GitHub Copilot,” Gill told TechCrunch. “We saw that adoption happen, and it was very clear to me that as a second-order effect, it’s going to cause bottlenecks in the code review.”  In early 2023, Gill started CodeRabbit, an AI-powered code review platform, and it acquired FlexNinja.  Gill’s prediction has come true: developers are now regularly…

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The Trump administration is using civil rights laws to wage a campaign against the University of California in an attempt to curtail academic freedom and undermine free speech, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday by faculty, staff, student organizations and every labor union representing UC workers.The lawsuit comes weeks after the Trump administration fined the University of California, Los Angeles $1.2 billion and froze research funding after accusing the school of allowing antisemitism on campus and other civil rights violations. It was the first public university to be targeted with a widespread funding freeze. The administration…

Gemini’s mobile adoption has been soaring since the August launch of its Nano Banana image editor model, which has received positive reviews, particularly from users who say they can now more easily perform complex edits and create realistic images. The app has climbed to the top of global app stores’ charts and has seen a 45% month-over-month increase in downloads in the month of September so far, according to new data provided by app intelligence firm Appfigures. Though the month is only half over, Gemini’s app has already gained 12.6 million downloads in September, up from 8.7 million in August.…