Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

WASHINGTON (AP) — Shrey Parikh felt the pressure of arriving at the Scripps National Spelling Bee as a favorite, but his confidence showed every time he got a word he knew. And when the bee came down to a lightning-round tiebreaker against Ishaan Gupta, Shrey left no doubt.Shrey turned a tense, high-quality final into a blowout Thursday night, racing through the 90-second “spell-off” and getting 32 words right to be crowned the best young speller in the English language. Ishaan spelled 25 words correctly in the tiebreaker.A 14-year-old from Rancho Cucamonga, California, Shrey finished third in 2024 but lost his…

Cloud infrastructure has long been designed around humans who search, click, scroll, and stream in a steady and predictable fashion. AI agents behave differently. They can unleash a swell of activity, spinning up multiple sub-agents that query hundreds of databases, search documents, and call APIs in seconds and then disappear as quickly as they arrived.  Under that premise, Amazon is redesigning a core piece of its cloud infrastructure. On Thursday, AWS launched its next generation of OpenSearch Serverless, a fully managed search and vector database — essentially a system for storing and retrieving information at scale — that’s designed specifically…

Asana has acquired the workflow automation company StackAI for $75 million, part of a larger effort to position itself as an AI-native workplace platform. StackAI’s founders, Tony Rosinol and Bernard Aceituno, will join Asana as part of the acquisition. Asana framed the acquisition as part of its broader AI pivot, in which it seeks to build its platform into “the operating system for human-agent teams.” The announcement was announced Thursday afternoon to coincide with Asana’s earnings and investor call. Built as an AI workflow-automation system, StackAI designs agents to operate within existing business systems, pulling in data from systems like…

Anthropic has arrived with the newest entrant in the AI race — and a new stack of cash.On Thursday, the AI lab announced a new $65 billion fundraise, valuing it at a staggering $965 billion and making it the most valuable AI startup — surpassing its rival OpenAI.The same day, Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.8, a new version of its general-purpose large language model. Anthropic called it a “modest but tangible improvement on its predecessor” and said it’s better at coding, reasoning, and general knowledge work.Anthropic is in the midst of a high-stakes fight for technological supremacy and market share with…

Anthropic has snagged $65 billion in funding at a $965 billion post-money valuation in its latest funding round, marking what could be the AI startup’s last private fundraising before debuting on the public markets. The Series H round was co-led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia Capital, Capital Group, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, and others. Institutional investors including Baillie Gifford, Blackstone, Brookfield, D.E. Shaw Ventures, DST Global, and Fidelity Management & Research participated in the round.  Strategic infrastructure partners, including Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, also joined the round. A portion of the round — $15 billion — is also…

The most important market of the future could be in LLM tokens — and financial groups are rushing to build new infrastructure for them. China’s Shanghai Futures Exchange is currently designing a derivatives market for AI tokens, Reuters reports. The news comes as major derivatives exchange CME Group and the Intercontinental Exchange (the owner of the NYSE) have separately said they’re working on launching futures contracts for renting GPUs. GPU markets are still maturing, but given the wide range of companies using, selling, and renting GPUs, there’s a robust market for spot prices on GPU rental, typically charged by the…

Amazon Web Services is in talks to soon add SpaceX’s latest Grok models to its flagship AI platform Bedrock, according to people familiar with the matter.The move would deepen AWS’s push to make Bedrock the central hub for top AI models. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, in turn, would gain access to a massive base of enterprise cloud customers as it prepare to go public in a huge IPO.Bedrock, launched in 2023, lets customers build AI applications using models from multiple providers, while AWS handles the underlying infrastructure. The platform already offers models from Anthropic, Meta, and Cohere. This year, AWS expanded…

For years, new video games looked like one of the best deals in entertainment: buy a console, buy a game, plug them into your home television, and play for hours.That bargain feels a lot less simple today. Price increases are hitting almost every layer of the hobby, pushing it increasingly toward luxury territory.Hardware prices have increased in the past year: Microsoft’s Xbox Series S jumped from $379.99 to $399.99 in October, and the Playstation 5 Disc Edition’s price rose from $549.99 to $649.99 in April. On Wednesday, Valve increased the prices of its popular Steam Deck systems to “reflect the…

Join us for StrictlyVC Los Angeles 2026, an intimate evening bringing together leading investors and entrepreneurs for high-signal conversations from the front lines of venture capital and frontier technology. Taking place Thursday, June 18, at The Aerospace Corporation Campus in El Segundo, this edition continues StrictlyVC’s focus on direct access to the ideas and leaders shaping where technology and capital are headed next. Secure your spot here. For executives, investors, and founders navigating an increasingly complex market, this is an opportunity to step inside conversations that rarely happen in public and hear directly from the people driving change across defense, AI, and advanced industry. Who’s taking the stage We will…

Elon Musk would like everyone to read the fine print.On Thursday morning, the billionaire wrote on X that SpaceX has “not committed to leasing Colossus for years” to Anthropic, clarifying that the current AI compute arrangement is a 180-day lease, with 90-day mutual cancellation rights after that.That does not contradict one of the most important revelations in SpaceX’s S-1 — but it does sharpen the caveat around it.Inside the sci-fi-ish 277-page financial disclosure document, SpaceX reported a $1.25 billion-a-month deal with Anthropic for access to compute from its Colossus data centers “through May 2029.” The arrangement, if it lasted in…