Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Elon Musk is ramping up efforts to compete with AI giants Anthropic and OpenAI. Loading audio narration… Musk’s AI startup, xAI, has held discussions in recent weeks with Mistral and AI coding startup Cursor about a potential three-way partnership, people familiar with the matter said. Mistral is a French AI startup that was founded in 2023 and has positioned itself as an independent alternative to US frontier labs.SpaceX, which owns xAI, announced a deal this week with Cursor that gives SpaceX the option to buy the French company for $60 billion. Business Insider reported last week that Cursor was training…

Google Cloud on Wednesday announced that its eighth generation of custom-built AI chips, or tensor processing units (TPUs), will be split in two. One chip, named the TPU 8t, will be geared for model training and another, the TPU 8i, is aimed at inference. Inference is the ongoing usage of models, aka what happens after users submit prompts. As you might expect, the company touts some impressive performance specs for these new TPUs compared to the previous generations: up to 3x faster AI model training, 80% better performance per dollar, and the ability to get 1 million+ TPUs to work…

IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — Police are seeking a 17-year-old on attempted murder charges following a shooting early Sunday in a nightlife district near the University of Iowa campus, authorities said Wednesday.Five people were treated for gunshot wounds, including three University of Iowa students. One woman remained in critical condition Wednesday after sustaining a life-threatening injury to her head, Iowa City Police Chief Dustin Liston said.Officials said an arrest warrant was issued for the 17-year-old who was allegedly engaged in the fight, adding that reports indicate as many as 40 people may have been involved. Officers had been dispatched to…

As part of its slate of Google Cloud Next announcements on Wednesday, the company shared plans to bring “auto browse” agentic capabilities to Chrome users in the enterprise, along with enhanced security measures. With auto browse, Chrome users can take advantage of Gemini to understand the live context in their open browser tabs, and then use the AI to handle various tasks like booking travel, inputting data, scheduling meetings, and others related to web-based work. Image Credits:Google Google suggests the tool could be used for things like inputting information in the company’s preferred CRM system based on content in a…

Google CEO Sundar Pichai opened the Google Cloud Next conference on Wednesday with a video in which he announced one of the company’s biggest new products: Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. Google’s tool is intended for building and managing agents at scale. This is Google’s answer to Amazon’s Bedrock AgentCore and to Microsoft Foundry. Given that AI, and agents in particular, are furthest along for technical tasks like coding, and that the tech is so new to the enterprise that security remains a real concern, Google has made an interesting choice with this tool. Agent Platform is particularly geared at IT…

During its Google Cloud Next conference on Wednesday, the company announced a slew of Workspace-focused updates, including the addition of its AI Overviews feature to Gmail. The feature, which today uses AI to summarize Google Search results, will now do the same for Gmail users in the workplace. According to Google, this will allow Gmail users to ask questions in search using natural language and then get concise answers without having to open and read different emails. The company suggests the feature could be used to ask business-related questions about topics typically shared in emails, like those about performance improvements,…

DALLAS (AP) — Court rulings are bolstering mandates to display the Ten Commandments in public schools in the U.S. as supporters push to expand the role of religion in classrooms, including making Bible stories required reading for students. The biggest drive yet to put the Ten Commandments in every classroom began last year in Texas, where a challenge to the law was batted down Tuesday by a U.S. appeals court. While the issue remains far from settled, the ruling was a victory for conservatives who reject arguments that the displays proselytize to students or step on the rights of parents,…

OpenAI has partnered with Infosys to integrate its artificial intelligence tools, including coding assistant Codex, into the Indian IT giant’s Topaz AI platform. Infosys said the integration will be used to help its clients modernize software development, automate workflows and deploy AI systems at scale, initially focusing software engineering, legacy modernization, and DevOps. India’s IT services firms face mounting pressure from a mix of slowing client spending and rapid advances in generative AI. Shares of Infosys have fallen over 22% this year amid a broader sell-off triggered by weak forecasts, investor concerns that AI tools could automate parts of traditional…

Three-quarters of new code created inside Google is now generated by AI and reviewed by human engineers, the company said Wednesday. Loading audio narration… That number has been notching up in recent years. As of October 2024, around a quarter of the company’s code was AI-generated, Google said at the time. Last fall, it said the number had risen to 50%.The company has been pushing employees to use AI both for coding and other tasks. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post on Wednesday that the company was shifting to “truly agentic workflows” with its engineers running more…

WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of 4-year-olds attending state-funded preschools reached record highs last school year, driven by states embracing universal access and an unprecedented $14.4 billion in spending. State-funded preschool enrollment in the U.S. rose to 1.8 million kids, reaching 37% of 4-year-olds and about 10% of 3-year-olds, according to an annual report published Wednesday by the National Institute of Early Education Research. In total, states added 44,000 students to their preschool enrollment. But the report’s authors noted that the gains were smaller than the year prior and said preschool access remains wildly uneven from state to state. Some…