Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

HAVERFORD, Pa. (AP) — A high school history teacher in Pennsylvania who helps students look inward to find their strengths and outward to find community inside and outside the classroom has been named the 2026 National Teacher of the Year.Leon Smith, 46, has spent his entire 25-year career at Haverford High School, where he teaches Advanced Placement classes in U.S. history and African American studies. He describes himself as a “warm demander,” someone who sets high expectations while surrounding students with love and support. Often, that means recognizing hidden talents and bringing them to the forefront, he said in an…

Apple is going back to what it does best with its new CEO pick. Loading audio narration… On Monday, the iPhone maker announced that Tim Cook is stepping down as CEO on September 1. John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, will take the helm.Ternus joined the company in 2001 and most recently oversaw Apple’s new product lines, including the iPad and AirPods, as well as new models of the iPhone, Mac, and Apple Watch. He also oversaw hardware engineering work on products across all categories.Analysts say giving the top job to a hardware VP rather than the…

President Donald Trump’s next “Tim Apple” isn’t falling far from the tree. Loading audio narration… On Monday, Apple announced long-expected but still seismic succession plans: CEO Tim Cook is stepping down, and in his place, John Ternus, senior vice president of hardware engineering, will lead the tech giant starting on September 1.Cook, the man Trump unintentionally called “Tim Apple” in 2019, will become executive chairman of Apple’s board of directors — a role that includes “engaging with policymakers around the world,” the tech company said.He’s had plenty of experience with that, particularly in an increasingly mercurial Washington, where a tech…

Tim Cook is the ultimate non-founder success story. As he steps down as Apple CEO after 15 years, that’s the biggest takeaway for me. Loading audio narration… Silicon Valley lauds founders as the only leaders capable of creating huge, disruptive, and lasting value. Cook blew this “founder mode” theory out of the water in spectacular fashion.I was there at the start. When Steve Jobs died in 2011, I went to Apple headquarters to report on the scene. Underneath the grief, questions lurked. Would the company be OK without its legendary cofounder? Cook, a supply chain and operations specialist, was taking over.…

A former Google engineer has gotten the company’s goat. Loading audio narration… And after receiving rare pushback in public from the tech giant’s AI CEO, the computer programming veteran is now doubling down.Steve Yegge, a software engineering veteran who used to work at the company, has faced a public onslaught after claiming last week that a “buddy at Google who’s been a tech director there for about 20 years” essentially said that their AI adoption internally was severely lagging.Google’s internal AI adoption curve, Yegge wrote last week, is the same “as John Deere, the tractor company.””Most of the industry has…

Tim Cook wants you to know he’ll remember your emails. Loading audio narration… The CEO, who announced on Monday he’ll be transitioning out of the top job on September 1, reflected on his time at Apple in a letter posted to the company’s website.”For the past 15 years I’ve started just about every morning the same way,” Cook wrote. “I open my email and I read notes I received the day before from Apple’s users all over the world.”Cook, who will remain at Apple as executive chairman, wrote that hearing from customers all around the world gave him a feeling…

Anthropic announced on Monday that Amazon has agreed to invest a fresh $5 billion, bringing Amazon’s total investment in the company to $13 billion. Anthropic, for its part, has agreed to spend over $100 billion on AWS over the next 10 years, obtaining up to 5 GW of new computing capacity to train and run Claude. The deal echoes an agreement Amazon struck with OpenAI just two months ago, when it joined a $110 billion funding round — contributing $50 billion — that valued the ChatGPT maker at a $730 billion pre-money valuation. That deal, too, was structured partly as…

The Tim Cook chapter at Apple is coming to an end. Loading audio narration… Apple announced on Monday that Cook is stepping down as CEO, effective September 1, 2026. Cook will remain at Apple as executive chairman.John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, who was widely viewed as Cook’s likely successor, will be taking the helm as chief executive. Apple also named executive Johny Srouji as chief hardware officer as part of its transition plan.Cook has worked at Apple for nearly three decades, first joining Apple in 1998 as senior vice president of worldwide operations. Apple cofounder Steve…

Google announced Monday that it’s making its Gemini in Chrome feature available in seven new markets, including Australia, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, and Vietnam. The company is rolling this feature out to both desktop and iOS in all of these countries except Japan. The company has been integrating AI and Gemini in more ways into Chrome since last year through a floating window. Earlier this year, the company introduced a sidebar-based assistant that would help users answer questions across tabs, and also utilize the Personal Intelligence feature of Gemini, which lets users connect to services like Gmail…

Thinking Machines Lab is facing more departures. Loading audio narration… The $12 billion AI startup founded by OpenAI’s former CTO, Mira Murati, has lost another three employees to Meta.Two — Mark Jen and Yinghai Lu — were part of the startup’s founding team. Jen is a software engineer who previously worked at Meta. Lu previously worked at Meta and OpenAI and focuses on inference, which helps AI chatbots with reasoning.A third Thinking Machines Lab employee, Tianyi Zhang, now also works at Meta. Zhang, an AI researcher who is not a founding member, has coauthored widely cited academic papers.None of the…