Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

The top stories and transfer rumours from Sunday’s newspapers…MAIL ON SUNDAY Kevin De Bruyne is expected to finalise a free transfer to Serie A champions Napoli over the next fortnight. Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player Kevin De Bruyne receives an emotional farewell from the Manchester City supporters from the Etihad Manchester United are to increase security for their final match of the season – amid a planned protest and growing anger at the club’s ownership.Trent Alexander-Arnold issued an emotional farewell message to his Liverpool team-mates during their final training session before drawing the curtain on…

Venture capitalists have always focused on investing in companies that leverage technology to either disrupt established industries or create entirely new business categories. But some VCs are starting to flip the script on their investing styles. Rather than funding startups, they are acquiring mature businesses — such as call centers, accounting firms, and other professional service firms —and optimizing them with artificial intelligence to serve more customers through automation. This strategy, often likened to private equity roll-ups, is being employed by firms such as General Catalyst, Thrive Capital, and solo VC Elad Gil. General Catalyst, touting this as a new…

Mistral AI, the French company behind AI assistant Le Chat and several foundational models, is officially regarded as one of France’s most promising tech startups and is arguably the only European company that could compete with OpenAI. But compared to its $6 billion valuation, its global market share is still relatively low.  However, the recent launch of its chat assistant on mobile app stores was met with some hype, particularly in its home country. “Go and download Le Chat, which is made by Mistral, rather than ChatGPT by OpenAI — or something else,” French president Emmanuel Macron said in a…

Fresh from a 10/1 winner in midweek, our betting expert Jones Knows unleashes his Premier League insight across the final round of matches.Nottingham Forest vs Chelsea, Sunday 4pm, live on Sky Sports – PLAY SUPER 6 HERE! Chelsea are the vulnerable ones in the final day race for the Champions League. Based on their soft underbelly away from home, winning just one of their last 10 Premier League games, this is a great spot for Nottingham Forest.A criticism of Enzo Maresca this season has been the predictability of Chelsea’s play and that is more apparent when you remove Nicholas Jackson…

Hello, and welcome to your weekly dose of Big Tech news and insights. These are the moments I feel so lucky to be a journalist in Silicon Valley. AI is rapidly changing so much important stuff, for better or worse. Even just witnessing this from the sidelines is a joy.I had a fancy newsletter ready to go, all about Google’s big I/O conference. Then, OpenAI bought Jony Ive’s AI gadget startup for $6.5 billion. It’s called io. Lowercase. I’m not joking. That’s the name.AgendaWhat you need to know about this OpenAI-io megadeal and what it means for Apple, Google, and…

Last week, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok experienced a “bug” that made it tell users about the “white genocide” conspiracy theory in South Africa, even when prompted with questions that had nothing to do with the topic … and soon after, Grok expressed skepticism over the Holocaust death toll, which it chalked up to a “programming error.” But with a degree of mental gymnastics that could put Simone Biles to shame, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has decided that Elon Musk’s robot baby Grok is too far left. Image Credits:Twitter/X (screenshot) “Grok is left leaning and continues to spread fake news…

OpenAI just made its biggest acquisition yet, scooping up Jony Ive and Sam Altman’s secretive device startup, io, in a $6.5 billion all-equity deal. Ive, the legendary designer behind the iPhone and other iconic Apple products, will now lead creative and design work at OpenAI through his firm LoveFrom. The goal? To take AI “beyond the screen” and build a new generation of AI-powered consumer devices. Beyond the tech, there’s a clear narrative play here. OpenAI is framing Altman as the Jobs-esque visionary and Ive as the design genius who makes it all real. Social media had a field day…

OpenAI is updating the AI model powering Operator, its AI agent that can autonomously browse the web and use certain software within a cloud-hosted virtual machine to fulfill users’ requests. Soon, Operator will use a model based on o3, one of the latest in OpenAI’s o series of “reasoning” models. Previously, Operator relied on a custom version of GPT-4o. By many benchmarks, o3 is a far more advanced model, particularly on tasks involving math and reasoning. “We are replacing the existing GPT‑4o-based model for Operator with a version based on OpenAI o3,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post. “The API version…

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — Two groups filed a lawsuit Friday over an executive order by West Virginia Republican Gov. Patrick Morrisey granting religious exemptions from required school vaccinations.The American Civil Liberties Union’s West Virginia chapter and Mountain State Justice filed the lawsuit against the state Department of Health, its Bureau for Public Health and agency leaders on behalf of two parents in Kanawha County Circuit Court.The vaccine exemption was among several executive orders issued by Morrisey on his first full day in office in January.“Governors do not rule by decree,” ACLU-West Virginia legal director Aubrey Sparks said in a statement.…

One of Microsoft’s latest AI models can accurately predict air quality, hurricanes, typhoons, and other weather-related phenomena, the company claims. In a paper published in the journal Nature and an accompanying blog post this week, Microsoft detailed Aurora, which the tech giant says can forecast atmospheric events with greater precision and speed than traditional meteorological approaches. Aurora, which has been trained on more than a million hours of data from satellites, radar and weather stations, simulations, and forecasts, can be fine-tuned with additional data to make predictions for particular weather events. AI weather models are nothing new. Google DeepMind has…