Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
This week at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event in Athens — part of the Panathēnea festival taking place in the city — I sat down with Niko Bonatsos of Verdict Capital, Andreas Stavropoulos of Threshold Ventures, and Ben Blume of Atomico to ask about the current state of venture investing, the wave of mega-IPOs that SpaceX is about to kick off, and where they still see an ocean of opportunity. Our conversation, following, has been edited for length and clarity. You can check out the full discussion at page bottom. With SpaceX reportedly eyeing a $1.75 trillion valuation at IPO, and OpenAI…
Google Chrome and Apple’s Safari currently dominate the web browser market, with Chrome holding a significant share due to the tech giant’s ongoing innovations, particularly in integrating generative AI into its search functionalities. However, users seeking alternatives will find a variety of browsers aiming to challenge these industry giants. To help navigate the competitive landscape of the browser wars, we’ve compiled an overview of some of the top alternative browsers available today. This includes browsers leveraging AI, open source browsers that promote customization and privacy, and “mindful browsers” — a new term that refers to browsers designed to enhance user…
Perplexity is gifting tech enthusiasts the industry’s hottest commodity.Demand for the Mac Mini has been going wild as AI tools take off, making it tough to get your hands on — unless you’re on Perplexity’s radar. The AI startup sent out Mac Minis to some people so they can try out Perplexity’s new technology.Perplexity’s Personal Computer, which began rolling out in April, is an expansion of its AI-powered browser agent Perplexity Computer. It works across local files, native applications, and the web. As of Friday, it only runs in Perplexity’s Mac app.Enter the Mac Mini. A handful of content creators,…
My day with Substack began at around 10 a.m. on Thursday, with the platform’s CEO, Chris Best, telling a crowd of writers that they “deserve to get rich” and “have fun.”It ended a little past 10 p.m. at a podcast studio office space with Substack cofounder Hamish McKenzie, eating pizza with the lingering media folk.Substack’s big day was its first-ever media summit — “The Once and Future Media Forum” — that brought together the newsletter platform’s content creators, journalists (like me), and founders of new media startups in a sprawling five-story building in the center of SoHo, in New York…
Dan Shipper says he doesn’t write many of his routine emails.Instead, the CEO of Every — an AI-focused media, software, and consulting company — said he uses OpenAI’s Codex to read his inbox, check his calendar, propose meeting times, and draft responses. The tool is not allowed to send emails without his approval, but Shipper said much of the scheduling correspondence around his Business Insider interview was generated by AI.”All the words are pretty much Codex,” Shipper said. He’s considering changing the “From:” field in his email to indicate when messages are drafted with his AI agent’s help.His New York…
Peter Thiel appears to have found a new bug-out spot. He isn’t alone in looking beyond America’s shores.The PayPal and Palantir cofounder and prominent libertarian has been spending more time in Argentina, The New York Times reported, where he has enrolled his children in school and bought a home in one of Buenos Aires’ wealthiest neighborhoods.Among the ultrawealthy, that fits a larger pattern. The rich are treating their lives in America like part of an investment portfolio: still worth betting on, but increasingly in need of a hedge.”There’s a clear trend toward sovereign diversification,” Charlie Garcia, founder of centimillionaire membership…
In 2026, you cannot pry AI coding tools out of developers’ vise grip, researchers have discovered. But while AI is undoubtedly helping coders produce code faster, it may not be producing better code, other researchers warn. And that could cause problems down the road for them. Specifically, in February 2026, respected AI research lab METR published a surprising revelation: Most developers won’t work, even on a limited number of tasks, without AI anymore. METR had hoped to provide an update to some groundbreaking research published a few months earlier, in 2025, on AI coding productivity. In it, researchers measured how…
The people deciding that AI can replace your job are also the ones least likely to understand what your job truly involves, according to Box founder Aaron Levie, who pointed to this as an example of “AI psychosis.” Indeed, ClickUp recently cut 22% of its workforce for AI agents, tech layoffs in 2026 are already nearly matching all of 2025, and DuckDuckGo installs are climbing from users who want Google to stop forcing AI into search and just give them links. On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into what happens when the AI-pilled and the AI-skeptical are both right at the same time, plus…
The Bose Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar is the company’s latest flagship home theater speaker. It’s part of the brand’s renewed focus on whole-home audio, and it joins the recently released Lifestyle Ultra Speaker and Ultra Subwoofer. All three devices can pair together to create a full surround sound system. But you don’t need to buy them all to get a great experience. On its own, the soundbar boasts impressive performance.Dolby Atmos playback is supported with upfiring audio drivers that create a sense of height. There’s also an AI-enhanced dialogue feature that makes speech easier to hear. And though adding a pair…
Artificial intelligence is changing the world, and simultaneously inventing a whole new language to describe how it’s doing it. Spend five minutes reading about AI and you’ll run into LLMs, RAG, RLHF, and a dozen other terms that can make even very smart people in the tech world feel insecure. This glossary is our attempt to fix that. We update it regularly as the field evolves, so consider it a living document, much like the AI systems it describes. Artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is a nebulous term. But it generally refers to AI that’s more capable than the average…