TheChek News Flow

Since the days of Alan Turing, artificial intelligence developers have been captivated by the prospect of AI powerful enough to improve itself. OpenAI, we recently reported, has already developed an internal AI “research assistant” tool to help its researchers work faster, a possible first step in the development of AI that can conduct AI research on its own.

Later this week, researchers at Model Evaluation and Threat Research, a nonprofit group, will publish a first-of-its-kind evaluation of how large language models from OpenAI and Anthropic perform when asked to solve seven AI research problems. An early look at the results show Anthropic did very well compared to OpenAI.

In five of the seven tests METR ran, the latest version of Anthropic’s most advanced model, Claude Sonnet 3.5, outperformed OpenAI’s most advanced model, o1-preview—and Claude won by a wide margin in two of them. O1-preview beat Claude on the other two tests, including a decisive win in one of the tests.

(Each test took 8 hours. For these results, the models were reset every 30 minutes because they tended to do best when they tried multiple times in that window. When the models were only allowed a single 8-hour attempt, Claude’s average score fell below o1-preview’s.)

Notably, both models were no match for the top human researchers who took the same tests, who scored more than twice as high as the models on average.

But METR gave the AI credit where credit was due: Claude was basically as good as the average human researcher in solving two of the problems, and o1-preview was about as good as an average human researcher in another problem.

In the AIs’ defense, the problems METR chose are difficult. Solving them requires a researcher’s full arsenal of techniques, from thinking up hypotheses to designing and running experiments, analyzing results and revising the hypotheses. It also requires a lot of creativity.

For example, one of the problems involved writing code for a language model from scratch, without using division or exponents—which are usually essential for that task. Another problem involves experimenting with traditional AI scaling laws, just like an employee at OpenAI might do, but using only a small amount of computing power.

Human Disadvantage

These problems aren’t exactly representative of the day-to-day work of an AI researcher. Most AI projects are not wrapped up in eight hours, and who ever heard of an AI researcher who couldn’t use division?

In fact, these tests are designed to put human participants at a disadvantage. That way, even if AI models catch up to humans on these tests, that would still mean the models are less capable than top human researchers overall and would give the AI firms time to make adjustments to improve their safety, said Hjalmar Wijk, who oversaw the tests.

For their part, OpenAI, Anthropic and other major AI developers also say that for the same reasons, they will measure their models’ ability to do AI research before releasing them. And both OpenAI and Anthropic let METR run its tests on their latest models before the models were released publicly.

The feds will be watching too, of course. A recent Biden memo on AI directed the U.S. AI Safety Institute, which sets standards for safe AI development, to test advanced AI models for their ability to “automate development and deployment” of AI with dangerous capabilities. The EU, meanwhile, referred to AI that develops AI as a “systemic risk” in a first draft of rules for the bloc’s AI Act, published last week.

AI companies undoubtedly have a strong incentive to develop AI that makes better AI, also known as recursive self-improvement. Our reporting on the recent challenges of traditional AI scaling methods suggest such AI isn’t nigh, but AI researchers have a habit of overcoming obstacles, so it’s never a bad idea to be ready!

Retailers and designers talk about the future of luxury’s tie-in with the streetwear market and where it’s heading next.

Is luxury‘s love affair with streetwear over?

Some might think so looking at the men’s runways over the last few seasons, which have pivoted from streetwear- and sneaker-dominated designs to more tailored styles with classic footwear.

But the streetwear gang says: Not so fast.

The link between streetwear and luxury reached its height over the last decade, with virtually every major design house tapping into the culture and appealing to a demographic that it had generally ignored in the past.

This year, streetwear’s position in the luxury market has been questioned following high-profile sales of Supreme, which was sold by VF Corp. to EssilorLuxottica after four years, and Off-White, which LVMH sold to Bluestar Alliance after three years, and the latest runway shows that displayed less streetwear-inspired silhouettes than prior years.

According to industry experts, streetwear still has a place in the luxury market, but its presence will likely shift as the overall fashion industry continues to face challenges and as there’s a growing appetite among streetwear customers for the brands to go back to their roots.

“Streetwear to me has always been this revolt against the status quo,” said Chris Gibbs, founder of streetwear store Union LA. “Admittedly, I think everyone in streetwear — especially in the last 10 years as streetwear kind of became the ‘it thing’ — a big part of who we’ve always been is doing these kinds of [fashion] collaborations. The more you collaborate with the thing you’re revolting against, the lines kind of get blurred.”

Don C, the streetwear designer and founder of Chicago-based retailer RSVP Gallery, shared Gibbs’ sentiment, stating that streetwear isn’t dead, it just needs to refocus its values and mission.

“I don’t think that anything is dead, I just think things aren’t as strong as they were,” he said. “That might just be because subjectively I am more used to it or it’s not where I am in my life as a subject looking at it. I bet there are certain kids today that are having the same energy or feeling the same feeling like when I first discovered things. I think streetwear is involved in every part of fashion. I see it on the runways, I see it on the streets. It’s just weird — the whole categorization of it.”

According to Luca Benini, the streetwear maven responsible for igniting streetwear in Europe in the late ‘80s, even if streetwear is no longer fueled by hype culture, the consequences of the unprecedented tie-ups and crossover between the luxury fashion establishment and streetwear players that have dominated the late 2010s and early 2020s have changed the industry for good.

“When Off-White came into the picture with its firepower, it had a strong impact. There is probably a little bit more of a stasis right now,” he said. “Of course, there are seasonal fluctuations, but I think that this cross-pollination has stuck, to the benefit of both parties. The fashion system as a whole benefited from it, on the one side with [luxury embracing] important cultural topics that were not part of the conversation before and on the other triggering streetwear brands to upscale their offering.”

Streetwear designer and author Bobby Hundreds thinks that the slowdown of luxury and streetwear will help set healthier and more realistic expectations for brands, many of which can’t scale to the levels of luxury players. These expectations can help streetwear brands connect with their subculture roots and communities, which have always been the backbone of the market.

“Over the next five years specifically, there’s going to be a correction in terms of more of a healthier balance around culture,” he said. “Communities are going to become more important. There’s going to be an emphasis on design and product, and for me, because I’m a writer and I believe in storytelling, so much of it’s going to come back to story.”

Laura Baker, the cofounder of New York City concept store Essx, thinks there will be a more distinct separation between streetwear and luxury aesthetically as streetwear brands reconnect with their origins.

“You have to go back to define what streetwear is,” she said. “Like, streetwear is what people are wearing outside. It’s what’s happening in the youth and in the culture and in the communities. It’s never meant to be just one thing. It’s not just about skateboard culture. It’s about all subcultures and it’s like, what’s the subculture of the moment?”

Streetwear is and always will be anchored on casual styles like T-shirts, hoodies and sneakers, but luxury’s impact on the streetwear market has influenced brands and newer labels to embrace classic menswear and suiting, and give it a streetwear touch.

“In the past decade, streetwear hung its hat on T-shirts, hoodies, logos and sweatpants, and it was bit sloppy,” Baker said. “I’m seeing a lot more design pieces. I’m seeing a lot more tailoring. I’m seeing a lot more style in it. I’m seeing a lot more individuality in streetwear where in the past decade, at least, it just felt very one-note across any brand, whether it was luxury or not luxury. Now it feels a lot more diverse. There’s room for a lot of different avenues and subcultures and people to enjoy streetwear.”

Many are also pointing to the merging of streetwear and traditional aesthetics to the maturation of the streetwear customer, who is getting older and looking for more sophisticated silhouettes.

“At the end of the day, every culture gets a little bit sophisticated as it gets older,” Don C said. “Similar with streetwear, hip-hop is like that, so as the people participating start experiencing other things because of wisdom or age or just wanting to be different and evolve a bit, that subculture will evolve. It’s all positive. To add suiting to streetwear, it’s cool that you can still be considered streetwear in a proper suit or something because, to me, it’s the attitude that you give that makes you streetwear, not the item.”

At Union LA, Gibbs stated he’s seeing a new subset of luxury streetwear brands that are blending elevated materials and craftsmanship with traditional silhouettes. Gibbs named brands like Satoshi Nakamoto, RRR-123, B1 Archive and Better With Age as some standouts in the category.

“Streetwear is a very graphic-based proposition,” Gibbs said. “These guys are taking those graphics, but building really considered, interesting architectural shapes and drapes in a way that I think is fun and interesting and I’m happy to see the evolution and how the consumer is consuming and digesting that and playing with it.”

For the future of streetwear, experts agree that staying in tune with communities and subcultures and not letting business pressures impact the creative side too much is key for its success.

“It’s a healthier balance for streetwear, which is a blend of transaction and commerce and art and culture,” Hundreds said. “It just can’t be heavily tilted one way or another. It needs to be a little bit more symmetrical. We’re seeing a new generation and a new school of independent brands, emerging designers and really revolutionary artists coming about and questioning a lot of the rules that have been put into place over the last decade, and that’s symptomatic and exemplary of much of the macro market, the macro economy, the macro culture. You’re seeing a high turn against institutions, a challenging of established rules.”

When it comes to streetwear’s link with luxury, there’s still opportunity for the two worlds to continue working together.

“If the market and the finance worlds’ impressions of streetwear are not as glowing as they were a decade ago, that is going to have a ramification down to the smaller brands and to the end user and to the consumer,” Hundreds said. “But, it doesn’t mean that it won’t stoke and inspire a next-generation brand to come in and reset the rules. Maybe much of the old way of that last decade or two decades is not the same anymore, but that’s kind of the magic of streetwear — it’s continually evolving. I always say that streetwear generation is about regeneration. I always say streetwear is dead because it’s then born again the next morning. It just keeps turning over and over and responding back to itself.”

ECB president also warns of heightened global trade tensions as ‘rival blocs’ form

Europe will not be able to afford its generous welfare state provision and increased investment in defence and in tackling climate change unless the region fixes a persistent decline in growth, the European Central Bank’s president Christine Lagarde has warned.

Without bold economic policies, the EU “will not be able to generate the wealth we will need to meet our rising spending needs to ensure our security, combat climate change and protect the environment”, Lagarde warned in a speech in Paris on Monday.

She added that the bloc was at risk of facing “a future of lower tax revenues and higher debt ratios” which would result in “fewer resources for social spending”.

A potential trade war, deemed more likely by analysts after Donald Trump won a second US presidential term this month, could further damage the wider region’s economy, Lagarde warned.

Without directly addressing the risk of US tariffs against imports from the EU and China, she stressed that the “geopolitical landscape” was “fragmenting into rival blocs, where attitudes towards free trade are being called into question”.

“We need to adapt quickly to a changing geopolitical environment and regain lost ground in competitiveness and innovation,” said Lagarde.

Joachim Nagel, Bundesbank president and a member of the ECB’s governing council, also warned that the world might be “on the brink of significant escalation” of “geoeconomic fragmentation”. “This is a concerning development, and we should all strive to restore co-operation and free trade,” he said in a speech earlier on Monday in Tokyo.

Even without a trade war, the gap between European and US GDP is set to widen further by the end of the decade, the IMF said last month in a report that sounded an alarm about the continent’s “lack of business dynamism”.

Europe’s ageing workforce and low productivity growth would reduce the continent’s average annual GDP growth for the 10 years until 2029 to just 1.45 per cent, compared with 2.29 per cent for the US over the same period. US growth has outpaced Europe’s since the global financial crisis, particularly since the Covid-19 pandemic.

In September, a report by former ECB president Mario Draghi argued that the EU had to invest more in a bid to tackle the bloc’s lagging competitiveness.

Europe was particularly exposed to the fallout from a potential trade war as it was “more open than others”, Lagarde said, pointing to the fact that trade accounted for more than half of Europe’s total economic output.

At the same time, the continent was “falling behind in emerging technologies that will drive future growth” such as artificial intelligence.

“We are specialised in technologies that were mostly developed in the last century. Only four of the world’s top 50 tech companies are European,” she warned.

The EU needed to respond to this by defining itself as a “single, large economy with predominantly shared interests” that should be pooling its resources in areas such as defence and the green transition, the ECB president said, adding that Europe’s “large, rich economy” had the necessary tools to “adapt” to the challenges.

“We can no longer see ourselves as a loose club of independent economies,” the ECB president said, adding that this view was “outdated in a world that is fragmenting into geopolitical blocs centred around the largest economies.”

Gianfranco Gianangeli, previously CEO at Maison Margiela and currently chief commercial officer at YSL, is to succeed Charbit at Balenciaga.

Cédric Charbit, chief executive officer of Balenciaga since 2016, is to become the new CEO of Saint Laurent, effective Jan. 2.

Gianfranco Gianangeli, previously CEO at Maison Margiela and currently chief commercial officer at Saint Laurent, is to succeed Charbit at Balenciaga on the same date.

French group Kering, parent of both Paris-based houses, revealed the twin appointments in a statement on Monday after the close of trading on the Paris bourse.

It marks a return to Saint Laurent for Charbit, who was executive vice president of product and marketing there when he took the management helm of Balenciaga eight years ago, arriving one year after creative director Demna.

Charbit takes over the title at Saint Laurent from Francesca Bellettini, who held onto the role when last year she was promoted to Kering’s deputy CEO in charge of brand development.

All brand CEOs — Kering is parent to Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga, Alexander McQueen, Brioni, Boucheron, Pomellato, DoDo and Qeelin — report to Bellettini, who was tasked with steering these companies in their next stages of growth.

“Cédric was one of my key collaborators during my time at Saint Laurent, and I’ve always admired his leadership and unique skills,” Bellettini said, speaking exclusively to WWD. “At Balenciaga, he not only drove incredible growth but also managed to steer the brand through challenges and bring fresh momentum. I’m confident he is the perfect leader to shape the next chapter of Saint Laurent.”

Bellettini has helmed Saint Laurent since 2013, initially working with designer Hedi Slimane, who dropped the late founder’s first name, Yves, from the brand name as his first order of business. Bellettini appointed Anthony Vaccarello as creative director in 2016.

During her tenure leading the house, she grew the size of the business roughly sixfold, according to market sources.

For her part, Bellettini said she is “excited to focus entirely on my role as Kering’s deputy CEO for brand development.…With the recent changes at Gucci and all other key appointments, we’ve got the right people in place to tackle today’s challenges and set the stage for the future.”

Charbit had initially joined YSL in 2012 as director of product strategy.

Once at the helm of Saint Laurent, he will be faced with reigniting sales momentum amid a slowdown in luxury sales, especially in China, and as inflation and high interest rates weigh on discretionary spending worldwide.

Comparable sales at Saint Laurent have been decelerating in 2024: down 6 percent in the first quarter, 9 percent in the second quarter and 12 percent in the third quarter.

Kering said Charbit’s mission would be to “leverage his expertise and leadership to further develop the iconic Parisian house, building on its unique positioning, heritage and identity.”

Before YSL, Charbit was deputy general manager at Emilio Pucci. Previously, the Frenchman held management roles in retail — as general merchandise manager for womenswear at Harrods in London and Printemps in Paris.

He is a graduate of ESC Toulouse business school and is prized for his strong fashion instincts and complicity with designers.

An exuberant, straight-shooting executive, Charbit had an eventful tenure at Balenciaga, leading the hype brand through a dynamic growth phase amid lusty demand for streetwear-tinged luxury items like sneakers, caps, logo sweatshirts and heavy-duty outerwear.

He also helped Balenciaga gingerly navigate its way back into the fashion spotlight after the brand was rocked by the advertising campaign crisis at the end of 2022 over images that critics claimed promoted the exploitation of children.

Gianangeli helmed Maison Margiela from 2020 to 2023, joining the OTB-controlled house from his family-owned, namesake knitwear manufacturer in Perugia, Italy, which he had revitalized, securing production contracts for several marquee European luxury brands.

He joined Saint Laurent in September 2023, and is one of clutch of fashion CEOs from smaller brands who have recently taken on lesser C-suite roles at luxury megabrands.

Before that, he was global retail director at Givenchy and associate international director at Prada. He began his career in 2006 at Bottega Veneta in various merchandising positions and as that brand’s regional vice president in Japan.

Sources describe Gianangeli as a well-rounded executive with an entrepreneurial streak, and strong merchandising flair.

“His task [at Balenciaga] will be to continue strengthening and expanding the house’s reach and renown,” Kering said.

Bellettini has known Gianangeli since 2008, when she joined Bottega Veneta as merchandising director.

“He was working in the merchandising team, and I immediately appreciated his talents,” she told WWD. “We worked together for several years at Bottega Veneta, and we remained always in touch through all those past years.

“I have always considered him as one of the most brilliant professionals of our industry,” she continued. “When he joined Saint Laurent last year, for me he was a great addition not only for the brand but for the group, and he is the perfect successor of Cedric at Balenciaga.”

“These evolutions further reinforce our organization,” François-Henri Pinault, chairman and CEO of Kering, said in the statement. “We have the right leadership team in place to address current industry challenges and set the pace for long-term growth.”

Mistral’s Le Chat chatbot platform can now search the web — with citations in line, a la OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It’s also gained a “canvas” tool along the lines of ChatGPT Canvas, allowing users to modify, transform, or edit content, like webpage mock-ups and data visualizations, leveraging Mistral’s AI models.

“You can use [the canvas feature] to create documents, presentations, code, mockups… the list goes on,” Mistral writes in a blog post. “You’re able to modify its contents in place without regenerating responses, version your drafts, and preview your designs.”

In addition to all this, Le Chat can now process large PDF documents and images for analysis and summarization, including files containing graphs and equations. As of today, the platform incorporates Black Forest Labs‘ Flux Pro model for image generation. And Le Chat can now host shareable automated workflows for tasks like scanning expense reports and invoice processing; Mistal calls these AI “agents.”

Some of Le Chat’s new capabilities, all of which will remain free while in beta, are made possible by Mistral’s new models.

One, Pixtral Large, can process both text and images — it’s the second in Mistral’s Pixtral family of models. Weighing in at 124 billion parameters, Pixtral Large matches or bests leading models including Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro, and OpenAI’s GPT-4o on certain multimodal benchmarks. (Parameters roughly correspond to a model’s problem-solving skills, and models with more parameters generally perform better than those with fewer parameters.)

“Particularly, Pixtral Large is able to understand documents, charts, and natural images,” Mistral wrote in a second blog post. “The model demonstrates frontier-level image understanding.”

Mistral also today unveiled a new version of Mistral Large, its flagship line of text-only models. Called Mistral Large 24.11, the new model brings “notable improvements” in long context understanding, Mistral says, making it well-suited for use cases like document analysis and task automation.

Both Pixtral Large and Mistral Large 24.11 can be used outside of Le Chat under two licenses: a more restrictive license for research and an enterprise license for development and commercialization. Mistral Large 24.11 is already in Mistral’s API and on AI platform Hugging Face, and will soon be available through cloud platforms including Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, Mistral says.

Paris-based Mistral, which recently raised $640 million in venture capital, continues to gradually expand its AI offerings. Over the past few months, the company has launched a free service for developers to test its models, an SDK to let customers fine-tune those models, and new models, including a generative model for code called Codestral.

Co-founded by alumni from Meta and DeepMind, Mistral’s stated mission is to create highly competitive models and services around those models — and ideally make money in the process. While the “making money” bit is proving to be challenging (as it is for most generative AI startups), Mistral reportedly began to generate revenue this summer.

“At Mistral, our approach to AI is different — we’re not chasing artificial general intelligence at all costs; our mission is to instead place frontier AI in your hands, so you get to decide what to do with advanced AI capabilities,” the company wrote in one of its blogs today. “This approach has allowed us to be quite frugal with our capital, while consistently delivering frontier capabilities at affordable price points.”

Backers of new US-British film and TV company include Nike, RedBird Capital Partners and Liverpool FC owner Fenway

Liverpool FC owner Fenway Sports Group, Nike and US financier Todd Boehly will come together in a newly merged US-British film and TV company run by sports and entertainment veterans including NBA star LeBron James.

On Monday, LeBron’s US-based The SpringHill Company will announce a merger with Fulwell 73, a UK film, television and music production company that is co-owned by a group including actor James Corden and producer Leo Pearlman. 

As part of the merger, shareholders will invest a further $40mn to help the company to grow. 

“I don’t think there’s an independent production company anywhere in the world that can boast a group of financial partners quite as strong as this merger is going to have,” Pearlman told the Financial Times. “It’s a hell of a line-up of people who are coming into this new business.”

SpringHill is a production company founded in 2020 by James and sport marketer Maverick Carter. It has directors including Serena Williams, and the backing of Fenway, Epic Games, Nike, RedBird Capital Partners and Main Street Advisors.

The group also includes the Robot Company, a marketing agency and consultancy, and Uninterrupted, which provides a platform for athletes to produce their own content.  

Fulwell 73, the production company behind TV series including The Late Late Show with James Corden and The Kardashians, is backed by Boehly’s Eldridge Industries. 

The group is helping develop a £450mn film and TV studio complex in Sunderland, north-east England. 

Pearlman said the deal, which is expected to close this quarter, would be a “merger of equals” that would position both businesses for the next “iteration of this industry”. 

He added that the merged group would be “a global content company” with entertainment at its core that would also look at “the tangential opportunities that exist in the industry now that you have to exploit to truly be successful”.

Pearlman pointed to the growing demand for sports stars in particular to create content directly for consumers on YouTube and social channels, alongside platforms such as Netflix. “The partnership between brand and content is becoming ever more important,” he said.

Carter, who is chief executive of SpringHill, said. “Like everyone, we see the ways audience behaviour is shifting.”

The combined group has not yet agreed on a name. SpringHill is named after the housing complex where James was raised, while Fulwell 73 refers to a stand at Sunderland Football Club’s former stadium and 73 to the last time Sunderland won a major trophy.

Fulwell 73 produced the Netflix documentary series Sunderland ‘Til I Die.

“We’re trying to convince LeBron and Mav to ditch their Liverpool allegiance and become Sunderland fans with the rest of us,” Pearlman said.

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