Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Venus Williams’ comeback is headed to the U.S. Open next month, when she will enter the redesigned mixed doubles tournament with Reilly Opelka via a wild-card entry.The 45-year-old Williams, who returned to the tennis tour last week after more than a year away, and Opelka were among the 14 teams announced Tuesday by the U.S. Tennis Association for its mixed doubles event on Aug. 19-20.Eight of the pairings received direct entry into the field based on having the highest combined current singles rankings, and six were given wild cards by the USTA.The players with spots in the bracket include nine…

NEW YORK (AP) — Coaches and players around the NFL expressed their sadness and condolences on Tuesday after a gunman killed four people at the league’s Manhattan office a day earlier.New York City Mayor Eric Adams said the gunman was attempting to reach the league’s part of the building but took the wrong elevator. An NFL employee was among those wounded, according to Commissioner Roger Goodell.Multiple coaches, including Aaron Glenn of the New York Jets and Brian Daboll of the Giants, opened their news conferences by referencing the shooting. Glenn said he wished it were a better morning, and Daboll…

AI may be transforming your job, but critical thinking is still key.That’s according to Bluesky CEO Jay Graber. She told Business Insider that developing critical-thinking skills is “very necessary” in this day and age.”AI is able to automate a lot of critical-reasoning tasks, and if we fully outsource our own reasoning, it’s actually not good enough to run in an automated fashion,” said Graber, who previously founded a social network focused on events called Happening.If you’re a student, maybe that means writing your essays by hand, Graber said. The idea is to build “the muscle for critical thinking,” and keep…

An AI chatbot is a pretty good interpreter. It can’t dredge a river.Microsoft researchers analyzed which careers are most and least likely to be affected by generative AI and large language models based on an anonymized dataset of 200,000 conversations between users in the United States and the tech giant’s Copilot chatbot, formerly known as Bing Copilot.They found that the jobs most likely to be affected involved those providing and communicating information, including translators, historians, and writers.The researchers avoided the most pressing question about AI: the extent to which it will eliminate or even grow jobs in the workforce. Rival…

By Ahmed EljechtimiBAB BERRED, Morocco (Reuters) -Beneath the blazing summer sun, Abderrahman Talbi surveyed the neat rows of flourishing cannabis blooms in compact fields, reflecting on how his life has changed since he joined Morocco’s burgeoning legal cannabis industry two years ago.Like many farmers in the northern Rif mountains who have long grown the crop illegally, Talbi is relieved that raids and seizures by the authorities are no longer a worry.”I can now say I am a cannabis farmer without fear,” Talbi told Reuters. “Peace of mind has no price.”Talbi’s pivot to legal farming is an example of what Morocco,…

Big Tech companies are laying people off.Big Tech companies are also hiring some people — AI superstars — by offering them pay packages worth tens of millions of dollars. Meta just spent billions to hire a single executive.How do we square those two things?MG Siegler, the blogger-turned VC-turned blogger again, spells it out this way:These companies are essentially saying to some employees that they’re so valuable that they’re worth paying not just a lot of money, but more money than basically anyone in the world gets paid — including, often, their own CEOs. And yet to others, they’re basically saying…

Gradient Labs, a London-based AI startup building customer operations AI agents for fintech companies, said it closed a $13 million funding round in one week, Business Insider has learned exclusively. The Series A round was led by Redpoint Ventures, with participation from LocalGlobe, Puzzle Ventures, Liquid 2 Ventures, and Exceptional Capital.Gradient Labs was co-founded in 2023 by Dimitri Masin, Neal Lathia, and Danai Antoniou — all early employees of Monzo, a challenger bank based in London.BI asked Masin, who is CEO, how he was able to close so quickly and what his advice is for other founders who are trying…

NEW YORK (AP) — A gunman who killed four people at a Manhattan office building before killing himself claimed in a note to have a brain disease linked to contact sports and was trying to target the National Football League’s headquarters but took the wrong elevator, officials said Tuesday. Investigators believe Shane Tamura, of Las Vegas, was trying to get up to the NFL offices after shooting several people in the lobby on Monday but entered the wrong elevator bank, Mayor Eric Adams said in interviews. Four people were killed, including an off-duty New York City police officer, Didarul Islam.Tamura,…

SINGAPORE (AP) — Katie Ledecky has ceded a tiny bit of ground in other events, but she’s still unbeatable in the 1,500-meter freestyle.She won it again Tuesday in the swimming world championships in Singapore, finishing in 15 minutes, 26.44 seconds. Simona Quadarella of Italy took silver in 15:31.79 – a European record – with bronze for Lani Pallister of Australia in 15:41.18 in a very quick-paced race.“I was just trying to get out fast, but comfortable enough that I could go from there,” Ledecky said. “I’m happy with the time and happy with the swim.”“I love this race,” she added.…

Julius AI, a startup that describes itself as an AI data analyst, announced it has raised a $10 million seed round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Horizon VC, 8VC, Y Combinator, the AI Grant accelerator participated in the round along with several high-profile angel investors, including Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, and Twilio co-founder Jeff Lawson, among others. Founder Rahul Sonwalkar launched Julius after graduating from Y Combinator in 2022, and pivoting away from the logistics startup he’d been building during the accelerator program. Julius is designed to act like a data scientist by analyzing and visualizing…