Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
The next big battleground for podcasts is video — and YouTube wants to cement its dominance.On Tuesday, YouTube announced a slate of new AI products as it seeks to solidify itself as the leader in the category over competitors like Spotify or Apple.Starting next year, audio-first podcasters will be able to generate video clips for YouTube from their audio transcripts. The tool uses Google’s Veo AI technology to generate short 30-second to 60-second visuals that can either become a YouTube short or a part of a long-form video upload. The feature will initially be available to a limited set of US…
Are you a jerk? Don’t expect to ask your chatbot and get an honest answer.Anyone who has used bots like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude knows they can lean a little … well, suck-uppy. They’re “sychophants.” They tell you what you want to hear.Even OpenAI’s Sam Altman acknowledged the issue with the latest iteration of ChatGPT, which supposedly was tuned to be less of a yes man. Now, a study by university researchers is using one of the key barometers of knowing-if-you’re-a-jerk: Reddit’s “Am I the Asshole” page — where people post stories good and bad, and pose the age-old question…
For years, Big Tech CEOs have touted visions of AI agents that can autonomously use software applications to complete tasks for people. But take today’s consumer AI agents out for a spin, whether it’s OpenAI’s ChatGPT Agent or Perplexity’s Comet, and you’ll quickly realize how limited the technology still is. Making AI agents more robust may take a new set of techniques that the industry is still discovering. One of those techniques is carefully simulating workspaces where agents can be trained on multi-step tasks — known as reinforcement learning (RL) environments. Similarly to how labeled datasets powered the last wave…
Harjot Gill was running FluxNinja, an observability startup he co-founded several years after selling his first startup Netsil to Nutanix in 2018, when he noticed a curious trend. “We had a team of remote engineers who were starting to adopt AI code generation on GitHub Copilot,” Gill told TechCrunch. “We saw that adoption happen, and it was very clear to me that as a second-order effect, it’s going to cause bottlenecks in the code review.” In early 2023, Gill started CodeRabbit, an AI-powered code review platform, and it acquired FlexNinja. Gill’s prediction has come true: developers are now regularly…
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The Trump administration is using civil rights laws to wage a campaign against the University of California in an attempt to curtail academic freedom and undermine free speech, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday by faculty, staff, student organizations and every labor union representing UC workers.The lawsuit comes weeks after the Trump administration fined the University of California, Los Angeles $1.2 billion and froze research funding after accusing the school of allowing antisemitism on campus and other civil rights violations. It was the first public university to be targeted with a widespread funding freeze. The administration…
Gemini’s mobile adoption has been soaring since the August launch of its Nano Banana image editor model, which has received positive reviews, particularly from users who say they can now more easily perform complex edits and create realistic images. The app has climbed to the top of global app stores’ charts and has seen a 45% month-over-month increase in downloads in the month of September so far, according to new data provided by app intelligence firm Appfigures. Though the month is only half over, Gemini’s app has already gained 12.6 million downloads in September, up from 8.7 million in August.…
HOUSTON (AP) — Houston slugger Yordan Alvarez has a “pretty significant” ankle sprain that is going to keep him out indefinitely, manager Joe Espada said Tuesday.Alvarez was injured when he turned his left ankle at home plate after scoring in the first inning of Houston’s 6-3 win over the Texas Rangers on Monday night. He had imaging done Tuesday and Espada gave an update on his condition before the series continued Tuesday.“This is going to keep him out for a while,” Espada said. “Let’s not get into days, weeks, any of that. We are going to take one day at…
Autonomous vehicles have long been touted as “just around the corner,” but the reality of bringing self-driving cars to the streets is far from simple. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 — October 27–29 at Moscone West in San Francisco — Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana joins the Disrupt Stage for a wide-ranging conversation on the true state of AVs and where the industry goes from here. Inside the self-driving reality check While headlines often highlight crashes, controversies, or overblown promises, Mawakana has spent years navigating the real-world path to autonomous mobility. At Disrupt, she’ll dig into what it actually takes to scale…
HUNTINGTON, W.Va. (AP) — Marshall University President Brad Smith and his wife, Alys Smith, have made a $50 million gift to the university to promote a program aimed at eliminating student debt, the school said Tuesday.The gift is the largest ever given to the public research university and the largest given by any sitting university president to their own institution, the school said.The money will go toward Marshall For All, a program that allows students to combine scholarships, grants, family contributions and work opportunities to obtain a bachelor’s degree without having to apply for student loans. Nico Karagosian, president and…
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced on Tuesday a raft of new user policies, including a pledge to significantly change how ChatGPT interacts with users under the age of 18. “We prioritize safety ahead of privacy and freedom for teens,” the post reads. “This is a new and powerful technology, and we believe minors need significant protection.” The changes for underage users deal specifically with conversations involving sexual topics or self-harm. Under the new policy, ChatGPT will be trained to no longer engage in “flirtatious talk” with underage users, and additional guardrails will be placed around discussions of suicide. If an…