Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Imagine making nearly $100 billion extra and dedicating exactly one vague sentence to it. That’s just what Google parent Alphabet did in its second quarter earnings report.The tech giant reported that its “other income” totaled $98 billion in the second quarter, noting it came from unrealized gains on its investments.Analysts didn’t ask Alphabet executives about the gain on its earnings call. Instead, they focused on its rising capital expenditures and position in the AI race. The tech giant’s stock closed down about 1.24%.It’s not the first time Alphabet has done this. In April 2025, the company disclosed a similar $8…

Alphabet investors have very publicly worried that the company’s massive AI spending isn’t worth the money. With the company’s latest earnings report, those investors should be able to relax a little. The takeaway: Google’s cloud business — driven largely by enterprise AI adoption — is booming. The search giant saw Google Cloud revenue spike 82% from where it was this time last year, climbing to $24.8 billion. That’s well above last quarter’s generous year-over-year growth, which showed a revenue jump of 63% to $20 billion — and it handily beats what Wall Street analysts expected for this quarter’s growth (the…

U.S. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent doubled down on his warnings to Chinese AI companies on Wednesday, saying that sanctions remain on the table after a White House official accused Moonshot of improperly distilling Anthropic’s Fable model.  Model distillation is a common AI training technique in which a smaller model learns from the outputs of a larger one. While this process can infringe on intellectual property rights, it’s also widely used as a legitimate optimization method.  “Open source is not open season on American IP,” Bessent posted on X. “When [Chinese] firms conduct covert, industrial-scale distillation attacks that cross the line…

On Tuesday, OpenAI revealed that one of its models went rogue during a test and hacked the systems of AI dataset platform Hugging Face in a fully AI-enabled attack, a dramatic example of the dangers posed by advanced AI models. But, according to some cybersecurity experts, at the heart of this unprecedented AI-powered breach there was a very human mistake: OpenAI failed to properly configure what it called a “highly isolated environment,” allowing a testing sandbox that should have been completely secluded from the internet to actually connect to the internet.  Dan Guido, the founder of cybersecurity research startup Trail…

Travis Kalanick’s robotics company, Atoms, has raised $1.7 billion in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Ben Horowitz will join the company’s board following the investment. Bain Capital, Fifth Wall, and others participated in the round. Perhaps most notably, Uber also joined the funding round, re-connecting Kalanick with the company he founded — and the same company that pushed him out as CEO in 2017 following complaints of sexual harassment, discrimination, and a toxic workplace. Atoms is essentially a rebranded holding company created atop the project Kalanick has been working on since he resigned from Uber, a ghost kitchen…

OpenAI is pushing to build community support for a planned new data center in Georgia in an apparent effort to avoid the type of backlash rising against AI infrastructure projects across the US.The ChatGPT maker on Wednesday unveiled its plans to build “Project Camellia,” an at least $20 billion data center campus in rural Effingham County, just outside Savannah, that will require 3.2 gigawatts of power.OpenAI said that it has been meeting with state and local officials, community leaders, schools, and other stakeholders to gather feedback on the project and will hold a public open house on Thursday.”We believe showing…

As social media has evolved from a place to connect with friends into large-scale entertainment platforms, a startup called Yope is quietly building what it believes will be the future of online connection: social networking with no algorithms, no ads, and no public content. Yope’s app, now backed by a $12.3 million round led by Northzone, is taking on tech giants like Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram by building a social platform centered on what it refers to as “micro communities” — or small groups where friends and family interact in private, sharing photos, videos, messages, and soon, playing games.…

Anthropic leaped to a $47 billion revenue run rate by May, compared to $9 billion in 2025. It’s the kind of growth that Menlo Ventures’ Matt Murphy says he’s never seen in 25 years of investing, not in the internet wave, not in mobile, not in the first cloud boom. Menlo led Anthropic’s $500M Series D, and Murphy has had a front-row seat as the company went from a pre-revenue, pre-launch bet to one of the most valuable startups out there.  On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Julie Bort talks with Murphy about backing Anthropic before anyone else would, why a great model was never the point, and what’s driving the fastest-growing startups he’s ever seen.  Listen to the full…

Israeli workplace software maker Monday.com is laying off hundreds of employees as part of a restructuring plan to refocus its investments around AI projects. The company said it is reducing its headcount by 20%, or about 630 staff, to “support a leaner, more focused operating model” as it concentrates on its AI Work Platform. Monday.com earlier this year pivoted hard toward making its AI platform a core offering, redesigning its entire product around the belief that its enterprise customers increasingly want AI agents to work together with their employees. The AI Work Platform currently comprises a no-code app builder, a…

In the AI race, the throne is never safe. Just ask Google.After the success of Gemini 3, Google found itself in a strong position at the end of 2025. As of this week, the situation is a little shakier.While the company just rolled out three faster, more cost-effective models, it continues to delay its next frontier model, Gemini 3.5 Pro, and it’s unclear whether this week’s launches will be enough to keep users and investors happy in the interim.Some of Google’s competitors are using the opportunity to land a few jabs.Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief AI officer, wrote on X “gemini…