Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

AI anxiety has made the internet nostalgic for older tech. So, I went on a mission to find out how much obsolete tech actually costs these days. Loading audio narration… While I may have scored cheaper gems on eBay or Facebook Marketplace, I decided to scour physical stores instead. Beyond the goal of finding old tech, my day spent combing for retro finds proved to me that younger Gen Z and Gen Alpha are indeed returning to analog — and showed why this might be.The “going analog” trend has gained traction this year among millennials and Gen Zers. From in-person…

AI may be booming, but behind the scenes, companies are wasting vast amounts of expensive compute. GPUs sit idle, workloads are over-provisioned, and cloud costs continue to climb. ScaleOps believes the problem isn’t a shortage — it’s mismanagement. The startup, which builds software that automatically manages and reallocates computing resources in real time, has raised $130 million at an $800 million valuation, ScaleOps said Monday. The Series C funding round was led by Insight Partners, with participation from existing investors, including Lightspeed Venture Partners, NFX, Glilot Capital Partners, and Picture Capital. The company says its software reduces cloud and AI…

A 15-year-old student shot a teacher at a Texas high school and then fatally shot himself Monday, according to authorities, who were still investigating what led to the early morning attack.No other injuries were reported at Hill Country College Preparatory High School in Bulverde, a small but growing city near San Antonio.The teacher was taken to a nearby hospital. Comal County Sheriff Mark Reynolds said hours after the shooting that he did not know her condition. “What happened today is something no community ever wants to face, but we prepare for something that we hope never occurs,” Reynolds said.He said…

Fresh off a successful Series C funding round in November, the South Korean fabless AI chip startup Rebellions has raised an additional $400 million. The latest funding infusion, which comes before a planned IPO later this year, was led by the Mirae Asset Financial Group and the Korea National Growth Fund. It also comes at the same time that the company is engaging in an aggressive expansion effort — with recently announced plans to grow its presence not only in Asia but also in the Middle East and the U.S. Founded in 2020, Rebellions develops and designs AI chips while…

French lab Mistral AI has raised $830 million in debt to build a new data center near Paris that will be powered by Nvidia chips, according to reports from Reuters and CNBC. Mistral first announced plans to build a data center last year, when its CEO Arthur Mensch said it would explore different financing options in February 2025. It plans to complete building the data center in Bruyeres-le-Chatel and make it operational in the second quarter of 2026, Reuters reported on Monday. Mistral did not immediately return a request seeking confirmation. Last month, the company said it would invest $1.4…

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — The Trump administration sued Minnesota and its school athletics governing body on Monday, carrying out a threat to punish the state for allowing transgender athletes to compete in girls sports.The lawsuit is part of a broader fight over the rights of transgender youth. More than two dozen states have laws prohibiting transgender women and girls from participating in certain sports and some have barred gender-affirming surgeries for minors. Courts have blocked some of those policies.In the lawsuit filed Monday, the Justice Department alleges the state Department of Education and the Minnesota State High School League are violating…

As AI coding tools generate billions of lines of code each month, a new bottleneck is emerging: ensuring that software works as intended. Qodo, a startup building AI agents for code review, testing and governance, is betting that verification will define the next phase of software development. The New York-headquartered startup has raised a $70 million Series B round led by Qumra Capital, bringing its total funding to $120 million. Maor Ventures, Phoenix Venture Partners, S Ventures, Square Peg, Susa Ventures, TLV Partners, Vine Ventures, Peter Welender (OpenAI), and Clara Shih (Meta) also joined in the round. Qodo is aiming…

Starcloud’s latest funding round values the space compute company at $1.1 billion, making it one of the fastest startups to reach unicorn status after graduating from Y Combinator. The company’s Series A, which closed 17 months after its demo day presentation, was led by Benchmark and EQT Ventures. It’s another sign of the interest in outsourcing data centers to orbit as resource and political obstacles slow their development on Earth, but the business model depends on unproven technology and significant capital expenditure. Starcloud has now raised a total of $200 million, and launched its first satellite with an Nvidia H100…

Anthropic’s viral moment is waning. Loading audio narration… Business Insider reviewed data from multiple tracking firms, which show that interest in the AI startup has begun to plateau following a remarkable surge when Anthropic refused to back down amid a contract dispute with the Pentagon.Data from Appfigures, an app intelligence firm, shows that ChatGPT overtook Claude in estimated daily downloads on the US Apple and Google Play stores earlier this month, a contrast from the brief window where Anthropic reigned supreme.Anthropic’s rise coincided with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and the AI giant taking a major hit after what Altman described…

Here is what I would tell someone if they asked me what I learned from “The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist,” which premiered at Sundance and opened in theaters on Friday: Loading audio narration… There are now 20,000 people working on artificial general intelligence, and fewer than 200 working on alignment and safety.Those numbers induce anxiety. Numbers, however, rarely tell the whole story.In the 104-minute documentary, directors Daniel Roher, the 2023 Academy Award winner for Best Documentary for “Navalny,” and Charlie Tyrell, try to make sense of the rapid onset of AI.It features several of the CEOs…