Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

OpenAI has set the goal of making an AI tool that could research its own improvements. Now, the company is preparing for the accompanying dangers.The potential for AI systems to achieve so-called “recursive self-improvement” has come to the forefront for AI leaders, after coding tools from OpenAI and Anthropic leaped forward over the last six months. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis also said this week that humanity now stands at the “foothills of the singularity,” the moment when AI begins to improve itself and outpaces human intelligence.OpenAI, which is aiming to go public this year, recently posted a job listing…

When Dan Lorenc, the CEO and cofounder of cybersecurity startup Chainguard, was asked which AI coding tools he expects to use less in the coming year, his answer got right to the point: “Everything that’s not Claude Code.”Lorenc is far from alone. In a survey of more than two dozen startup founders and venture capitalists, Business Insider found a growing consensus that Anthropic’s Claude Code has quickly become the default AI coding tool inside startups, earning high marks for how it handles complex engineering tasks and autonomous workflows.”The shift in how code is being developed is like the evolution of…

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen says he sees several advantages to a world dominated by AI coding agents and bots.”The bots never get frustrated with you,” Andreessen told Joe Rogan during a recent episode of Rogan’s “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, adding amid laughter that a bot “never gets drunk, never gets sick, never gets high” or files “HR complaints.”Andreessen, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz, said that right now in Silicon Valley, the “state of the art” setup is to run roughly 20 bots at once. That way, the agents can run concurrently, and the user doesn’t have to wait constantly to provide…

When Dev Shah won the Scripps National Spelling Bee in 2023 and Faizan Zaki took the title last year, they posed for remarkably similar photos on the confetti-strewn stage. Standing next to them, beaming, was a bespectacled man in an aloha shirt, holding up a copy of his book “Words of Wisdom.”For Scott Remer, the champion spellers’ coach, posing for a picture was more than just a celebration. It was a business necessity.While nearly every National Spelling Bee champion over the past 15 years has worked with a coach, the 32-year-old Remer is the country’s only full-time, pror for elite…

In the latest sign of these AI-heavy times, the National Transportation Safety Board temporarily removed access to its docket system after discovering that voices of pilots who were killed in a UPS plane crash last year had been re-created using AI and were circulating on the internet. The NTSB is prohibited by federal law from including cockpit audio recordings in its docket system, which otherwise contains troves of data on investigations and has historically been open to the public. But the accident docket for this flight included a spectrogram file of the voice recorder. A spectrogram uses a mathematical process…

For thousands of Meta employees, it’s now the AI way or the highway.As 8,000 Meta employees were reading their layoff notices on Wednesday, 7,000 others opened a very different email. They had been selected to join a new AI initiative spun up directly by CEO Mark Zuckerberg — and it would be crucial to accelerating Meta’s position in the AI race.Many employees learned they would move into a group called Applied AI (AAI), which Meta created earlier this year, led by engineering vice president Maher Saba and reporting to chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth.Others were recruited to groups more specifically…

So bad, it’s good? Google on Friday joined in the disco ball icon fun taking place on home screens everywhere. After Spotify’s temporary new disco ball app icon, released to celebrate the company’s 20th anniversary, drew extensive online backlash (and a bit of praise for those who like a little kitsch!), Google decided to get in on the joke and rolled out a custom set of Android app icons sporting a similar disco ball theme. On X, Android ecosystem head Sameer Samat posted, “Your wish is our command. Disco icons available on Pixel as of today…Are y’all sure you still…

Last month, Scott Stevenson, co-founder and CEO of the legal AI startup Spellbook, took to X in an effort to expose what he called a “huge scam” among AI startups: inflation of the revenue figures that they announce publicly. “The reason many AI startups are crushing revenue records is because they are using a dishonest metric. The biggest funds in the world are supporting this and misleading journalists for PR coverage,” he wrote in his tweet. Stevenson isn’t the first to claim that annual recurring revenue (ARR) — a metric historically used to sum up annual revenue of active customers…

With the release of its new Lifestyle Audio Collection, Bose is recommitting to wireless home audio in a big way. And the Bose Lifestyle Ultra Speaker is a versatile piece of the puzzle. This powerful smart speaker can be used for listening to music, solo or in a stereo pair. It can also be used as a rear speaker in a home theater setup with Bose’s new Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar. Even if you start with just one, you can always add more speakers later on, letting you build a multi-room setup over time.For over a decade, I’ve covered Bose, Sonos,…

The SpaceX S-1 is finally here, and the story it tells goes way further than rockets. The filing runs to 36 pages of risk factors alone, and the numbers inside match the ambition: a $28 trillion total addressable market, a pay package tied to establishing a Mars colony, and a valuation target that would make it the largest IPO in American history.  Watch as Equity podcast hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into what the filing actually says, what it leaves out, and whether any of this math connects to reality. The team also covers NanoCo turning down a $20M buyout to raise a $12M seed for its secure Nano Claw…