Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Mike Liberatore, xAI’s chief financial officer, has left the company, according to reporting from The Wall Street Journal. This marks the latest in a string of high-profile executive departures.  The former Airbnb executive joined the company in April and left around the end of July, per the WSJ. While at xAI, he helped orchestrate the company’s $5 billion debt raise, alongside another $5 billion in equity — almost half of which came from SpaceX. He also oversaw some of the Elon Musk-owned AI firm’s data center expansion in Memphis.  Liberatore’s departure comes after xAI’s general counsel, Robert Keele, left in…

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — South Carolina’s law allowing for family leave after the birth of a child should also provide at least six weeks of paid time off when a baby is stillborn, according to an opinion from the state’s top lawyers.After lawmakers approved the paid leave for teachers and other school district workers as well as other state employees in 2023, lead sponsor Republican Rep. Neal Collins said he heard of at least three school districts that refused to let teachers have paid time off after their baby died during childbirth.“Even though their child was stillborn, these parents went…

CoreWeave, which provides cloud servers to large companies training AI models, has struck an agreement to acquire OpenPipe, a two-year-old Y Combinator-backed startup that helps enterprises develop customized AI agents with reinforcement learning, the companies announced on Wednesday. “Reinforcement learning is emerging as a pivotal force to strengthen model performance on agentic and reasoning tasks,” said Brian Venturo, co-founder of CoreWeave, in a statement to TechCrunch. “By combining OpenPipe’s advanced self-learning tools with CoreWeave’s high-performance AI cloud, we’re expanding our platform to give developers at AI labs and beyond an important advantage in building scalable intelligent systems.” CoreWeave and OpenPipe did…

Having the U.S. vs. the world is getting closer to an NBA All-Star reality.The NBA is closing in on finalizing another new format for this season’s All-Star Game, one where three eight-man teams — two from the U.S. and one composed of international players — would square off in a round-robin tournament, a person with knowledge of the plan said Wednesday.The league’s competition committee has reviewed details of the plan and reacted positively to the concept, said the person, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the format has not been finalized by the league.Having 16…

Of all the crappy ways smartphones have affected our health, this one is a real kick in the pants.A first-of-its-kind study links excessive scrolling on the phone while sitting on the toilet with hemorrhoids.(Insert poo emojis.) But, seriously. Sitting on an open bowl offers no support for the pelvic floor. That puts pressure on veins in the rectum, making them swollen and inflamed.“The longer you sit on the toilet, the worse it is for you,” said Dr. Trisha Pasricha, director of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s Institute for Gut-Brain Research Institute in Boston. Pasricha is also an author of…

NEW YORK (AP) — Amanda Anisimova upset Iga Swiatek 6-4, 6-3 in the U.S. Open quarterfinals Wednesday, less than two months after losing to the six-time Grand Slam champion in the Wimbledon final by a 6-0, 6-0 score.The No. 8-seeded Anisimova reached her third major semifinal and first at Flushing Meadows.“To come back from Wimbledon like that is really special to me,” said Anisimova, a 24-year-old who was born in New Jersey and grew up in Florida. “I feel like I worked so hard to try and turn around from that. … Today is really special.”The powerful strokes and poise…

A 14-year-old has beaten a rare cancer that doctors initially misdiagnosed as a sports injury.A video released by Cleveland Clinic Children’s Hospital shows Evan Lallo ringing the “bravery bell” back in June, signaling he had completed his final chemotherapy treatment.In the video, as Evan rings the bell, family members, friends and hospital staff cheer him on and give him high-fives and hugs.Cleveland Clinic via Storyful – PHOTO: Evan Lallo, 14, rang the “bravery bell” in June after completing treatment for Ewing sarcoma, a rare type of cancer.”I was surprised by how many people were there to support me that day.…

Karen Hao, the bestselling author of “Empire of AI,” has watched OpenAI go from a nonprofit “laughingstock” to a $90 billion powerhouse chasing artificial general intelligence at breakneck speeds. Hao, who first profiled the company back in 2020, says early visions of building AI “for humanity’s benefit” were quickly overtaken by a familiar Silicon Valley mindset: Move fast, break things, and let scale be the measure of success. This week, Hao joined TechCrunch’s Equity podcast to unpack the direction the AI boom is going and who’s paying the price. Hao argues that, like historical empires, today’s AI giants rely on…

Inspired by his grandparents, who were apple farmers in China, Charlie Wu got the idea to apply technology to agriculture while studying computer science at Cornell University, a top agriculture school. “I got to meet fruit professors who are the best in the world at what they do,” Wu told TechCrunch. “Through talking to them, I realized even the largest farms in the nation basically have no idea what is actually growing out in their fields.” He dropped out of Cornell, became a Thiel fellow, and in 2022 began building Orchard Robotics, a startup that uses cameras and AI to…

Google’s AI note-taking and research assistant NotebookLM now lets users customize the tone of their Audio Overviews, which are podcasts with AI virtual hosts that summarize and discuss documents shared with NotebookLM, such as course readings or legal briefs. When generating an Audio Overview, users can now choose whether they want their AI podcasts to be formatted as a “Deep Dive,” “Brief,” “Critique,” or “Debate.” A Deep Dive features conversational dialogues where two AI hosts unpack the topic with depth and questions. A Brief is a bite-sized overview that’s designed to help you quickly grasp the core ideas from your…