Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Amazon is training its AI models on Twitch livestreams, and its users are not happy about it.Twitch, which Amazon owns, announced on Wednesday that users could opt out to prevent Amazon’s AI models from training on their content. That announcement also served as official confirmation that the training was happening at all.On a livestream explaining the changes, Mary Kish, Twitch’s head of community, said she expected a user backlash.”We don’t expect you to be happy or excited about this,” she said. “I don’t expect anyone to react to this favorably.”She was right.The live chat function on the livestream was awash…

TikTok is battling it out with the big dogs in online shopping, and it’s starting to pay off.In July, US spending on its e-commerce platform, TikTok Shop, was greater than online spending at major retailers like Target, Costco, and The Home Depot, according to US credit and debit card transaction data compiled by the customer-intelligence firm Consumer Edge.TikTok Shop accounted for about 2% of online US retail spending last month, up from around 1.2% a year ago, per Consumer Edge’s analysis.That jump in market share is “massive,” said Michael Gunther, SVP of Research & Market Intelligence at Consumer Edge.TikTok is…

In HallPass’ product shot, sugar is “suger,” and package is “pacaage.”The lower-calorie candy company comes from some big names in food. Its cofounders are Peter Rahal, the cofounder of David Protein and RxBar, and Michael Tierney, the founder of Stuffed Puffs. It also operates under Medici Brands, David Protein’s parent company.And yet, its Monday launch was full of AI flubs.Much of the text is a blurred garble of letters. Take the words under “peanut creme crispy waters” (they were going for “wafers”). They’re completely incoherent, a classic example of AI image generators’ well-documented struggle to replicate text. What do those…

The streaming platform Twitch will now use creators’ content to help train generative AI models for its parent company, Amazon. This move has inspired swift and concentrated backlash from the Twitch community, especially because creators are opted in to having their content used for this AI training by default. For Amazon, these stream recordings are incredibly valuable, offering thousands of hours of audio and video content to help train AI models. But Twitch users worry that since creators have to manually opt out, they might be surrendering their content to train Amazon’s AI content models without even knowing it. This…

AI cloud company CoreWeave just offered fresh evidence in one of the biggest debates hanging over the AI boom: How long can AI chips stay useful and keep generating revenue?The AI cloud company recently signed a contract to rent out Nvidia A100 GPUs well into 2029, CoreWeave Chief Financial Officer Nitin Agrawal told analysts late Tuesday. Nvidia introduced the A100 in 2020.That means customers are committing to use these chips for running AI about nine years after their launch.This matters because investors have been fiercely debating how quickly AI hardware loses its economic value. Critics and short sellers have argued…

WARNER ROBINS, Ga. (AP) — A shooting at a Georgia high school Wednesday left one student wounded, and a teenage suspect who fled was later taken into custody, police said.The shooting at Warner Robins High School involving two ninth-graders occurred just one week into the new school year and prompted a response from dozens of law enforcement officers. Warner Robins is about 102 miles (164 kilometers) southeast of Atlanta.“Today a call that we train for every year happened to come to Houston County,” Sheriff Matt Moulton said at an evening news conference.The injured student was taken to a hospital for…

Cognition, maker of the AI coding agent Devin, is reportedly already talking to investors about raising another funding round with a big leap in valuation, after it raised $1 billion at a $26 billon valuation in May. This new round could deliver at least a $40 billion valuation based on achieving a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate, according to sources cited by Bloomberg. Three months ago, when it announced its last raise, Cognition’s Scott Wu confirmed to TechCrunch that it had achieved a $492 million annualized revenue run rate and that enterprises were growing their usage of Devin by…

As projects like Pacing the Frontier look to major labs as a way to keep AI research safe, open source models have become a sore spot for the industry. With free distribution and little control over how they’re used, open-weight models aren’t easily controlled, leading some labs to treat them as downright scary. But at the Ai4 conference in Las Vegas last week, three of the world’s most respected AI researchers — Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, World Labs CEO and co-founder Fei-Fei Li, and Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng — spoke out on the issue. And while they disagreed on…

Thrive Holdings has raised $2 billion in new funding at a $12 billion valuation from investors like SoftBank, D1 Capital Partners, and Altimeter Capital.  Thrive Holdings is akin to a private equity firm for AI, buying traditional businesses like accounting firms and implementing AI into their workflows. So far, Thrive has focused on accounting and information technology, but part of Wednesday’s raise will go toward expanding a new vertical in physical assets. Key to that strategy is Thrive’s close relationship with OpenAI.  The New York Times was first to report the news.  The firm is a spinout of Thrive Capital,…

Mesh, the relationship manager and personal CRM acquired by WordPress.com’s parent company, Automattic, last year, is now available to users on Android devices. The software allows users to privately visualize and keep track of the people in their personal and professional networks, add notes to people’s contact information, and be reminded when to reach out. On Android, the company customized Mesh’s app to work with key platform features, like split-screen and pop-up views. This allows users to access Mesh while working in other apps, like messages or email. It also supports keyboard shortcuts for foldables and tablets, in-app search, home…