Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
The growl of a V8 engine — a deep, throaty roar that swells when a driver stomps the gas pedal — had for years been fading from auto assembly floors.No longer.The American automotive landscape is changing after a period that saw tighter emissions rules push automakers toward more efficient, quieter powertrains and prompted shifts away from big V8 engines.But many of those regulations, including the federal EV incentives, have fallen away, leading automakers that once promised to discontinue the gas-hungry engines to reinvest in V8 offerings — especially in full-size trucks and performance cars.The shift isn’t a wholesale retreat from…
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with William Tunstall-Pedoe, 56, a founder and CEO. Amazon’s acquisition of his startup and his role at Unlikely AI have been verified by Business Insider. This piece has been edited for length and clarity.I helped create Alexa, a product that everyone has heard of and most people have used. I’m proud of what we built.But by 2016, it was clear that leaving Amazon, which I joined after the company acquired my startup, was the right decision. Continuing to work on Alexa would have been a very different job from building and launching…
Harvey CEO Winston Weinberg wants to be under pressure.Weinberg said that he’s realized he does his best work when he goes to sleep, dreading just how busy he’ll be the next day.”The weeks that I do the best work or feel like I did the best work is every single night before I go to bed, I’m like, ‘Ah, shit,'” Weinberg told investor Harry Stebbings during a recent episode of Stebbings’ “20VC” podcast.Harvey is one of the hottest names in the closely-watched legal AI startup space. In December, Weinberg’s firm said it had reached an $8 billion valuation.Weinberg said he…
There’s a long banner hanging in Amplitude’s San Francisco office. It reads: “NO MAGICAL THINKING.”No, it’s not some rag on Joan Didion. It’s a reminder, CEO Spenser Skates told Business Insider, that technology can never replace deep thinking and hard work. In the AI age, that reminder is more important than ever — so much so that employees must look up at it every day.Amplitude, an 800-person, publicly traded analytics company, is undergoing an AI transformation — with the goal of reinvigorating its business.Amplitude went public in September 2021 at the height of the pandemic, climbing to an all-time closing…
Snowfalls can now beget windfalls.As Americans rush to buy essentials ahead of Winter Storm Fern, some are also buying shares on prediction markets, like Kalshi and Polymarket, betting on how much snow will fall in New York City.Traders on Kalshi have bet almost $900,000 as of Saturday afternoon on whether more than 12 inches of snow will fall in New York City on Saturday and Sunday. Meanwhile, on Polymarket, traders have bet about $210,000 on how much snow New York City will see this weekend. The winning category is now 8 to 10 inches.The storm is expected to bring heavy…
There were times at this week’s meeting of the World Economic Forum when Davos seemed transformed into a high-powered tech conference, with on-stage appearances by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and even more industry executives. The big topic, unsurprisingly, was AI, with CEOs laying a vision for the technology’s transformative potential while also acknowledging ongoing concerns that they’re inflating a massive bubble. Amidst all that big-picture prognostication, they also found time to take swipes at their competitors, and even at their ostensible partners. On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s…
Big Tech companies and upcoming startups want to use generative AI to build software and hardware for kids. A lot of those experiences are limited to text or voice, and kids might not find that captivating. Three former Google employees want to get over that hurdle with their generative AI-powered interactive app, Sparkli. Sparkli was founded last year by Lax Poojary, Lucie Marchand, and Myn Kang. As parents, Poojary and Kang were not able to satisfy their children’s curiosity or give engaging answers to their questions. “Kids, by definition, are very curious, and my son would ask me questions about…
Big Tech companies and upcoming startups want to use generative AI to build software and hardware for kids. A lot of those experiences are limited to text or voice, and kids might not find that captivating. Three former Google employees want to get over that hurdle with their generative AI-powered interactive app, Sparkli. Sparkli was founded last year by Lax Poojary, Lucie Marchand, and Myn Kang. As parents, Poojary and Kang were not able to satisfy their children’s curiosity or give engaging answers to their questions. “Kids, by definition, are very curious, and my son would ask me questions about…
We’re in a unique moment for AI companies building their own foundation model. First, there is a whole generation of industry veterans who made their name at major tech companies and are now going solo. You also have legendary researchers with immense experience but ambiguous commercial aspirations. There’s a clear chance that at least some of these new labs will become OpenAI-sized behemoths, but there’s also room for them to putter around doing interesting research without worrying too much about commercialization. The end result? It’s getting hard to tell who is actually trying to make money. To make things simpler, I’m proposing a kind of sliding scale for any company making…
Cassandra King was thrilled to complete the first trimester of her pregnancy in the fall of 2024. She and her husband had spent years trying to have a baby, and she had experienced multiple miscarriages. The couple decided to celebrate with a babymoon to Jamaica during the 17th week of her pregnancy.At first, the trip went smoothly. King only felt “a little bit of pregnancy discomfort.” Then came the “burning, spasming pain” in her shoulder on their final night. It felt like a fist between her shoulder blades and down her spine, King said. She vomited for two hours before…