Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

This as-told-to essay is based on conversations with Bill Atienza, 29, who is a startup founder in California, and one of his former clients, Phil Hargrove, 80. Atienza founded an AI-powered on-demand technology support platform that operated until 2023. He continued working with clients to improve technology and become more familiar with AI. Hargrove shared more about his relationship with Atienza. These interviews have been edited for length and clarity. Loading audio narration… In the past, it took months or years to create software, but now it takes me, or another person my age, less than an hour to create…

Update (April 7, 10:30 PM PT): The company has updated the app store listing and removed references to the Android app. But it also added that the iOS keyboard is coming soon. Google on Monday quietly released an offline-first dictation app called “Google AI Edge Eloquent” on iOS to take on the likes of Wispr Flow, SuperWhisper, Willow, and others. The app is free to download, and once its Gemma-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) models are downloaded, you can start dictating on your phone. In the app, you can see the live transcription, and when you hit pause, the app…

Contractors filed five lawsuits against Mercor, the AI training firm valued at $10 billion, in the past week, accusing the company of violating data privacy and consumer protection laws. Loading audio narration… The suits, filed in federal courts in California and Texas, allege Mercor’s negligence could have resulted in the disclosure of Social Security numbers, addresses, and other information, including recordings of interviews, to bad actors.The lawsuits seek unspecified monetary damages.Mercor said last week that it was impacted by a breach of the open-source project LiteLLM, which was created by Berrie AI, without describing the stolen data.Techcrunch reported that sample…

Arcee, a tiny 26-person U.S. startup that built a massive, 400B-parameter open source LLM on a $20 million shoestring budget, has released its new reasoning model. Arcee calls the model Trinity Large Thinking — and it’s the most capable open-weight model “ever released by a non-Chinese company,” claims CEO Mark McQuade to TechCrunch. As that comment implies, Arcee has a goal that I can’t help but root for: It wants to give U.S. and Western companies a model that gives them no reason to use a Chinese-based one. While Chinese models are extremely capable, they are perceived as risky, putting…

A U.S. judge on Tuesday ruled that a customs officer improperly canceled the visa of a Russian-born scientist and Harvard University researcher charged with smuggling frog embryos in the U.S. The opinion said Customs and Border Protection officers have limited authority to cancel visas and can’t do so for suspected smuggling of biological samples. The cancellation of Kseniia Petrova ‘s visa was arbitrary and capricious, U.S. District Court Judge Christina Reiss said in her written ruling. “The undisputed facts reveal that Ms. Petrova’s visa was impermissibly canceled because of the frog embryo samples and for no other reason,” Reiss wrote.…

Anthropic said on Tuesday that it has halted the broader release of its newest AI model, Mythos, due to concerns that it is too good at finding “high-severity vulnerabilities” in major operating systems and web browsers. Loading audio narration… “Claude Mythos Preview’s large increase in capabilities has led us to decide not to make it generally available,” Anthropic wrote in the preview’s system card. “Instead, we are using it as part of a defensive cybersecurity program with a limited set of partners.”The announcement is a major step for Anthropic, which in February weakened a safety pledge about how it would…

Bible stories like Jonah and the Whale would be part of a new Texas public schools reading list that drew an overflow crowd to Tuesday’s state education board meeting. Religious leaders, teachers, parents and students spent hours arguing about the reading list for the state’s 5.4 million kindergartners to 12th-graders. The debate comes as the country’s long-standing wrangling over the role of religion in public schools continues to drive legislation and legal action. Nationally, President Donald Trump has pledged to protect and expand religious expression in public schools. And Texas, a red state that is home to about one in…

Asia AI data center provider Firmus on Monday announced a fresh $505 million raise led by Coatue at a $5.5 billion post-money valuation. With this round, Firmus has raised $1.35 billion in six months, it says. The Singapore-based data center company previously raised AU$330 million (approximately $215 million) at an AU$1.85 billion ($1.2 billion) valuation from investors, including Nvidia. Firmus is developing an energy-efficient “AI factory” network of data centers in Australia and Tasmania, a project it dubs Project Southgate. It is using Nvidia’s reference designs for building these efficient data centers. These new data centers will use Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform —…

Intel will join SpaceX and Tesla in an effort to build a new U.S. semiconductor factory in Texas, although the scope of its contributions are unclear. “Our ability to design, fabricate, and package ultra-high-performance chips at scale will help accelerate Terafab’s aim to produce 1 TW/year of compute to power future advances in AI and robotics,” Intel said in a corporate post on X. Intel hasn’t shared any more information. Elon Musk announced in March a team-up between the two tech companies he leads to develop chips for AI compute, satellites, and SpaceX’s mooted space data center and to support…

Anthropic on Tuesday released a preview of its new frontier model, Mythos, which it says will be used by a small coterie of partner organizations for cybersecurity work. In a previously leaked memo, the AI startup called the model one of its “most powerful” yet. The model’s limited debut is part of a new security initiative, dubbed Project Glasswing, in which 12 partner organizations will deploy the model for the purposes of “defensive security work” and to secure critical software, Anthropic said. While it was not specifically trained for cybersecurity work, the model will be used to scan both first-party…