Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
Anyone worried that AI will replace them should take a deep breath, at least according to Apollo Global Management’s chief economist.In a blog post on Friday, Torsten Sløk said there is “zero evidence of job losses because of AI,” citing the ADP National Employment Report. Instead, he said, companies are hiring candidates who have AI skills.”Many firms are hiring AI implementation experts, and the data center buildout is putting upward pressure on salaries for AI experts and on prices of semiconductors, equipment, and energy,” Sløk said. “The bottom line is that the AI spending boom is stoking both employment and…
Big Tech is expanding into communities across the country — and they aren’t all that happy about it.Many residents in cities and towns where tech companies are looking to build large data centers to power their AI products are mobilizing against them, concerned about a possible drain on water supplies, a surge in electricity costs, and a decline in their overall quality of life.Now, legendary environmental activist Erin Brockovich, famously played by Julia Roberts in the 2000 film about her work, has joined the fight.Brockovich said on a recent episode of “The Jim Acosta Show” that communities are angry because…
Box founder Aaron Levie got us talking this week with a social media post suggesting that tech CEOs are “uniquely prone to AI psychosis.” On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I did our best to unpack Levie’s comment. For one thing, we noted that he isn’t disavowing AI tools, merely insisting that CEOs need to actually use those tools to understand them. That’s a relatively gentle note of skepticism compared to other signs of a broader backlash, whether you look at graduating college students booing any mention of AI, the bad vibes around…
What if your favorite TV show was also a blog? With a livestream? And you could interact directly with the creators and stars in the comment section?That’s part of Substack cofounder Hamish McKenzie’s vision for how the platform can expand beyond newsletters. Substack wants its HBO moment.Substack launched a TV app in January, and McKenzie said he sees a future where people use the platform to subscribe to their favorite channels, studios, or independent filmmakers — along with listening to podcasts, reading the written word, and commenting.”It’s already happening,” McKenzie told Business Insider in an interview during an all-day event…
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Greg Lindgren, a 57-year-old bar operator from San Francisco. He co-owns 15 Romolo, The Cordial, Rye Cocktail Bar, and the events company Rye on the Road with Jon Gasparini. It’s been edited for length and clarity.In San Francisco, you throw a rock, and you hit a laptop.We started in the industry at the adolescence of the 1.0 boom. I have friends who worked for Webvan. Over the years, we’ve worked for all of the household names in the PayPal Mafia that survived the first crash and created the second wave.When we…
SoftBank Group announced today that it plans to spend up to €75 billion (around $87 billion) to expand data center capacity in France. The goal, the firm said, is to develop and operate up to 5 gigawatts of additional data center capacity. The first phase of the plan involves building data centers in Dunkirk (Loon-Plage), Bosquel, and Bouchain to deliver 3.1 gigawatts of capacity to the Hauts-de-France region by 2031. SoftBank, which is both an investor in and customer of OpenAI, says this will be its largest AI infrastructure investment in Europe. In a statement, French economic minister Roland Lescure described…
Utah’s governor is all for new AI data centers — under certain conditions.After a massive data center project backed by “Shark Tank” investor Kevin O’Leary outraged many Utah residents, the governor is issuing new parameters around its development.In an executive order on Friday, Gov. Spencer Cox established a “higher bar for data center development in Utah.””Utahns deserve confidence that water resources, air quality, utility rates, wildlife, and quality of life will be protected. This framework helps ensure that data center development aligns with Utah’s long-term interests and reflects Utah values,” Cox wrote in an X post.The framework contains eight principles…
The golden age of Microsoft’s Github Copilot appears to be at an end — for the little guy, at least. The company is switching its billing system from a flat subscription rate to a token-usage system that has the potential to bill users at a significantly higher rate. Bigger enterprises may still have the juice for it, but smaller companies and workers could find themselves wondering how they’re supposed to balance the monthly budget. The changes, which will take place June 1, mean that users will charged based on how many tokens they burn through as they work instead of…
Meta is developing an AI-powered pendant that it plans to start testing in the next year, according to a memo viewed by The Information. This device would presumably build on the work of Limitless, an AI device startup that Meta acquired at the end of 2025. The startup made an AI pendant that users could attach to their shirt or wear as a necklace to record their conversations. At the time, Meta said the acquisition would allow it to “accelerate our work to build AI-enabled wearables.” Earlier AI wearables have failed to catch on with consumers — perhaps due to…
Gemini Spark is Google’s new 24/7 agentic assistant, designed to help you help you “navigate your digital life,” which essentially means getting your online to-dos done, summarizing the things you don’t have time to read (like the entirety of your inbox), or organizing something that would have otherwise involved too much screen time-filled manual labor, like a personal expenses spreadsheet. The service was first introduced at Google’s annual developer conference in May, where CEO Sundar Pichai joked that Spark, which runs on virtual machines in the cloud, means that “yes, you can close your laptop.” The in-joke here is that…