Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

This is it. The countdown is almost over. You now have until tonight at 11:59 p.m. PT to lock in Early Bird savings of up to $410 for TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 before prices increase. If Disrupt has been on your must-attend list, this is your final chance to secure the lowest available rates before the next price jump hits. Once the deadline passes, so do the savings. Register now and join 10,000+ founders, investors, operators, and innovators at Moscone West in San Francisco from October 13–15 for three days packed with networking, startup discovery, and conversations shaping the future of tech. Bring a +1 at 50%, or your community with…

NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump’s administration on Friday moved to give political appointees more power over the billions of dollars in grants awarded by federal agencies, a move scientists say puts critical research funding into the hands of partisans without relevant expertise.In what would be the most sweeping change to the federal grantmaking process in years, the proposed regulations would require senior appointees to review funding to see if it complies with the law and the president’s priorities. The rules would also give administration officials more freedom to terminate grants that have already been awarded, a process that…

Earlier this month, I got my hands on the Kiwibit Bird Feeder Pro 4K AI Camera, and it has become my favorite backyard accessory.  Setting it up is pretty straightforward. Multiple mounting options allow you to place the feeder on a pole, window ledge, or tree. Its dual seed compartments are designed for easy refills and cleaning. The solar panel on top ensures you don’t have to worry about batteries running low. Durability and camera quality are also strong points. Other specs include support for 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, cloud storage, built-in two-way audio with a microphone and speaker, and a…

Australia’s workplace tribunal says it’s getting overwhelmed by requests from people using AI when submitting cases. Its solution? More AI.An increasing number of cases informed by AI-generated content are being brought to the tribunal, and it’s on track to increase its workload by 70% over the last three years, the general manager of Australia’s Fair Work Commission, Murray Furlong, said in a report published Friday.Across the legal world, AI has lowered the barrier to filing a case. Institutions like Australia’s Fair Work Commission are asking whether they can fight fire with fire and use AI to manage the rising workload.Furlong…

The British autonomous-vehicle software startup Wayve is bringing together a dream team of “top-tier AI research talent” to look beyond self-driving cars.The company is launching a new research unit called Wayve Labs, led by Wayve chief scientist Jamie Shotton, a former Microsoft executive with a Ph.D. in computer vision from the University of Cambridge. The lab will focus on embodied intelligence, or AI systems that can understand and act in the physical world.Shotton, who has worked at Wayve for nearly five years, said the lab aims to push the company’s research beyond self-driving cars and explore how its AI models…

Every time you ask ChatGPT a question, your request triggers a data relay race. Information leaves memory, passes through a CPU for preprocessing, travels to a GPU for heavy computation, and then makes its way back — and that entire journey repeats for every single word the AI generates. The bottleneck is structural — it means routing through some of the most expensive and power-intensive chips in the industry on every single request. That inefficiency is exactly what XCENA, a startup with offices in South Korea and the U.S., is trying to solve. The four-year-old startup has designed a chip…

When a corporate leader has to integrate AI into their giant global company with tens of thousands of employees scattered across offices around the world, there’s probably going to be some discomfort.Cisco’s chief customer experience officer, Liz Centoni, described the process as “surgery without the drugs.””It’s painful,” she told Business Insider.Cisco makes networking, security, and collaboration technology for companies, including routers, switches, cybersecurity tools, and services that help connect and protect corporate IT systems. So its customer support team is essential.Centoni, who leads Cisco’s roughly 20,000-employee customer experience division, said she is now transforming it into an AI-native services organization.She…

While Anthropic hypes its unreleased Mythos AI model as dangerously powerful, Google is changing the conversation — to cost and speed.Google says its latest Gemini 3.5 Flash model rivals frontier offerings, while saving money for companies that are racking up huge bills by churning through billions of tokens, the core unit of AI usage.”Companies are already blowing through their annual token budgets and it’s only May,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said recently. “If companies used a mix of Flash and other frontier models they could save a lot of money.”The timing of Google’s new model is no coincidence. As companies…

CIOs are worried their AI budgets are starting to max out with nothing to show for the costs incurred.Uber COO Andrew Macdonald gave voice to the growing concerns when he said that he’s yet to see direct improvements in line with AI spending.The rise of budget consciousness stands in stark contrast to the freewheeling “tokenmaxxing” culture some companies adopted as AI agents began to spread. Many companies didn’t adopt the leaderboards that made the initial wave of tokenmaxxing go viral, but AI costs are rising across the board.Here is what tech executives, engineers, and analysts are saying about the brewing…

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Kenyan police arrested eight female students on suspicion of arson, authorities said Friday, after a fire destroyed a dormitory at a boarding school, killing 16 children and injuring dozens of others. The motive remains under investigation.The girls were arrested for planning and carrying out a suspected arson attack at Utumishi Girls School in central Kenya, according to the Directorate of Criminal Investigations, or DCI, a department of the national police.In addition to the deaths, the blaze on Thursday morning left 79 others injured. Police spent the whole day Thursday questioning 30 students at the school and…