Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Twelve “tech legends” walk into a bar and start getting picked off one by one — who would you trust to suss out the killer?You can get a glimpse into that scenario thanks to a new show that gathered a group of Silicon Valley elite — including OpenAI founder Sam Altman, Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, and biohacker Bryan Johnson — to play Mafia, a murder-mystery game of deception.The show, which launched Thursday on YouTube and X, is from Founders Fund, the San Francisco-based venture capital firm co-founded by Peter Thiel.For viewers unfamiliar with Mafia, the purpose of the game is…

Private investors have been falling over themselves to get a piece of Anthropic, given the AI model maker is growing at a dizzying pace. Multiple investors told TechCrunch that the company’s $65 billion fundraise at a $965 billion valuation, announced last week, was greatly oversubscribed. Now, with that private demand still strong, Anthropic has revealed that it’s taking steps toward a public listing by filing confidentially for an IPO. Co-founder Daniela Amodei, speaking at the Bloomberg Tech conference on Thursday, said the decision comes down to capital. “It’s a really big upfront cost to train the models and to serve…

Google is the latest Big Tech company to do layoffs this year.Employees working at Google Cloud have been hit by cuts over the last two weeks, two people familiar with the matter told Business Insider.One team, Google’s Threat Intelligence Group, which is one of Google’s top security units and regularly publishes research about hackers, was impacted yesterday, the people said. Some employees have been posting about the layoffs on LinkedIn.The cuts were not limited to that unit, affecting others at Mandiant — a cybersecurity company bought by Google in 2022 — and within Google Cloud, the people added.It’s unclear exactly…

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky has had enough of merely being an artificial intelligence kingmaker. He now plans to back a new AI lab of his own. The news, broken by Bloomberg and confirmed to TechCrunch by a person familiar with the situation, marks Chesky as one of many Silicon Valley machers who are unsatisfied with the models coming out of the frontier labs. While Airbnb has adopted AI coding tools, Chesky said last year it hasn’t struck an LLM partnership because existing products weren’t quite ready. Still, Chesky has plenty of insight. He met Sam Altman in 2006 through Y…

With just two weeks to go, StrictlyVC Los Angeles is quickly approaching. On Thursday, June 18, at The Aerospace Corporation Campus in El Segundo, investors, founders, and tech leaders will gather for an evening of conversation exploring some of the most consequential shifts taking place across venture capital, defense technology, artificial intelligence, and advanced industry. Secure your spot here. For executives navigating a rapidly changing technology landscape, StrictlyVC offers something increasingly difficult to find: direct access to the people building, funding, and shaping the next generation of companies. The conversations are candid, the audience is highly curated, and the insights extend far beyond what can be found in…

Sam Altman said AI budgeting had recently become a “huge issue” for some companies — and it sent AI bubble watchers and doomers into a frenzy.During a Tuesday enterprise event, Altman referenced memes like, “My company spent my entire 2026 budget in Q1.” “That went from, at the beginning of this year, an issue that never came up — people were totally happy with the amount they were spending — to all of a sudden, a huge issue,” Altman said.The reader response was loud. Some said that it was a warning of dark times or a failure in AI business model.…

It’s not just data centers.Residents in a small Texas county are also now protesting SpaceX’s proposed Terafab semiconductor facility in another sign of growing backlash against AI across the country.Elon Musk’s rocket company has submitted proposals to build the first phase of its chipmaking moonshot, which will cost at least $55 billion, in Grimes County. It could reach $119 billion if additional phases are built. About 30,000 people live in Grimes, which is about an hour outside Houston.SpaceX’s Terafab project is a joint venture with Tesla and Intel. Musk has said that, once online, it could vastly increase the global supply of…

Just when you thought the AI data center boom couldn’t get any crazier, Meta has gone and built data centers in tents. The strategy appears to borrow in equal parts from Tesla and xAI. In a bid to cut construction time in half, Meta has built six tents — or “rapid deployment structures” as the company describes them — outside of New Albany, Ohio, according to Michael Thomas, founder of Cleanview, which tracks data center deployments. Thomas’ findings aren’t totally new. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke to the Information last year about his plan to use weatherproof tents to house the…

Kevin O’Leary has agreed to scale back his proposed Utah data center project after pressure from a top state lawmaker.On Thursday, O’Leary pledged to cut the proposed 40,000-acre Stratos development in Box Elder County nearly in half. Most of the remaining project area would be left as open space, O’Leary wrote in a letter to Utah Senate President J. Stuart Adams.”We will agree to remove 19,430 acres in and around the Locomotive Springs area in recognition of the Locomotive Springs Waterfowl Management Area immediately to the south,” the letter says.It’s a major concession in the fight over one of the…

Poke, a startup that turns using AI agents into something as simple as sending a text message, has become the first AI agent approved to run on Apple’s Messages for Business platform. Previously, the platform was designed for businesses — airlines, retailers, hotel chains, and others — to communicate with their own customers through iMessage, offering a standardized interface that supports both automated chat and live agents. Until now, it hadn’t been open to stand-alone third-party AI agents. Launched in March, Poke is one of the first AI agents designed to be accessible to everyday users who don’t have the…