TheChek News Flow

Amazon is reviewing claims that the artificial intelligence startup Perplexity AI is scraping content — including from prominent news sites — without approval.

Amazon spokesperson Samantha Mayowa confirmed Friday that the tech giant was assessing information it received from the news outlet WIRED, which published an investigation earlier this month that said Perplexity appeared to scrape content from websites that had prohibited access from such practices. Perplexity uses servers by Amazon Web Services, otherwise known as AWS.

Amazon’s “terms of service prohibit abusive and illegal activities and our customers are responsible for complying with those terms,” Mayowa said in a prepared statement. “We routinely receive reports of alleged abuse from a variety of sources and engage our customers to understand those reports.”

Perplexity spokesperson Sara Platnick said Friday that the company had determined that Perplexity-controlled services are not crawling websites in any way that violates AWS terms of service.

The San Francisco-based AI search startup has been a darling of prominent tech investors, including heavy hitters such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. But in the past few weeks, the company has found itself in hot water amid accusations of plagiarism.

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas has offered a robust defense of the startup after it published a summarized news story with information and similar wording to a Forbes investigative story. It did so without citing the media outlet or asking for its permission. Forbes later said it found similar “knock-off” stories lifted from other publications.

Separately, The Associated Press found another Perplexity product invented fake quotes from real people.

Srinivas said in an AP interview earlier this month that his company “never ripped off content from anybody. Our engine is not training on anyone else’s content,” in part because the company is simply aggregating what other companies’ AI systems generate.

But, he added, “It was accurately pointed out by Forbes that they preferred a more prominent highlighting of the source.” He said sources are now highlighted more prominently.

This summer, sunscreen and bug spray are not enough for the next generation of skincare-obsessed tweens. Gen Alpha’s “Sephora Kids” are so obsessed with beauty products that summer camps have taken action to ban them from suitcases and cabins.

Lake Bryn Mawr Camp, an all-girls sleepaway retreat in northeastern Pennsylvania; Camp Mataponi in Maine; and Tyler Hill Camp, near the Pennsylvania-New York border, are among several summer havens explicitly telling campers and their families to avoid bringing makeup brushes and face creams to camp, Business Insider reported. Camp Canadensis, located in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains, has seen campers cycle through trends over the years and sent a letter to parents to prepare them to address their kids’ latest obsession.

“While nail polish and sheet masks in limited quantities can be a fun activity sprinkled into downtime at camp,” the letter said, “we want to avoid ‘playing with skincare and cosmetics’ becoming an activity.”

Parents have rejoiced at camps cracking down on skincare. A few years ago, sheet masks became trendy among young people, a fad that soon escalated into multi-step beauty routines. Some parents complained of their middle-school-aged girls going through 20 pounds of product, including some that cost upward of $90 an ounce. With U.S. households with 6- to 12-year kids spending 27% more on skin care last year than they did the year before, per a report from NielsenIQ, beauty has become a fixation for Gen Alpha. And it’s not only a distraction from camp activities—it’s a full-blown obsession.

“It’s everything: retinol serums, masks, hyaluronic acids, eye creams,” one parent with a 9-year-old camper told Insider. “I’ve seen them come over with cosmetic bags full of every single expensive product that I wouldn’t even pay for myself, like $40 blushes and Dior lip oil.”

Beauty beyond the bunk beds

Skincare is certainly the latest fad among Gen Alpha, a demographic who appear to want to grow up fast. The generation born between 2010 and today, now nearing teenagedom, are entranced with beauty influencers and vulnerable to brands associated with status. Influencer beauty content online has not only helped drive sales of cosmetic products, but also encouraged Gen Alpha—who spend over two hours per week online shopping—to use their parents’ credit card to buy popular brands.

“Whether we like it or not, many kids are chronically online, having grown up with the internet,” Alex Popken, vice president of trust and safety at content moderation service WebPurify, told Fortune. “They have a level of digital literacy in navigating sites above and beyond what their parents have.”

Through their online escapades, tweens have come across products like Drunk Elephant’s polypeptide cream and The Ordinary’s squalane serum that contain skin-firming retinol meant for older, wrinkle-fearing adults. Skincare experts are skeptical of kids using these products when really, most should only be using cleansers, moisturizers, and sunscreen.

“They don’t understand the function of skin and that it’s not just this wall you can throw anything at,” dermatologist Brooke Jeffy told USA Today. The fight to convince them otherwise is “of word of reason—word of their parents, sometimes, word of me or other physicians—against this huge industry of beauty and social media.”

But worried parents have reason not to panic, according to Keneisha Sinclair-McBride, pediatric psychologist at Boston Children’s Hospital. Just as with any trend, it comes and goes, with Gen Alpha likely to bandwagon onto whatever interest the internet decides it should have next.

“Sometimes we put adult lenses on things. For example, kids are probably attracted to skin care simply because they think it’s fun and the products smell good — we’re panicking that next they’re going to want anti-aging treatments,” she told Today. “We’re putting our own grown-up fears onto them.”

When Rodney Brooks talks about robotics and artificial intelligence, you should listen. Currently the Panasonic Professor of Robotics Emeritus at MIT, he also co-founded three key companies, including Rethink Robotics, iRobot and his current endeavor, Robust.ai. Brooks also ran the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) for a decade starting in 1997.

In fact, he likes to make predictions about the future of AI and keeps a scorecard on his blog of how well he’s doing.

He knows what he’s talking about, and he thinks maybe it’s time to put the brakes on the screaming hype that is generative AI. Brooks thinks it’s impressive technology, but maybe not quite as capable as many are suggesting. “I’m not saying LLMs are not important, but we have to be careful [with] how we evaluate them,” he told TechCrunch.

He says the trouble with generative AI is that, while it’s perfectly capable of performing a certain set of tasks, it can’t do everything a human can, and humans tend to overestimate its capabilities. “When a human sees an AI system perform a task, they immediately generalize it to things that are similar and make an estimate of the competence of the AI system; not just the performance on that, but the competence around that,” Brooks said. “And they’re usually very over-optimistic, and that’s because they use a model of a person’s performance on a task.”

He added that the problem is that generative AI is not human or even human-like, and it’s flawed to try and assign human capabilities to it. He says people see it as so capable they even want to use it for applications that don’t make sense.

Brooks offers his latest company, Robust.ai, a warehouse robotics system, as an example of this. Someone suggested to him recently that it would be cool and efficient to tell his warehouse robots where to go by building an LLM for his system. In his estimation, however, this is not a reasonable use case for generative AI and would actually slow things down. It’s instead much simpler to connect the robots to a stream of data coming from the warehouse management software.

“When you have 10,000 orders that just came in that you have to ship in two hours, you have to optimize for that. Language is not gonna help; it’s just going to slow things down,” he said. “We have massive data processing and massive AI optimization techniques and planning. And that’s how we get the orders completed fast.”

Another lesson Brooks has learned when it comes to robots and AI is that you can’t try to do too much. You should solve a solvable problem where robots can be integrated easily.

“We need to automate in places where things have already been cleaned up. So the example of my company is we’re doing pretty well in warehouses, and warehouses are actually pretty constrained. The lighting doesn’t change with those big buildings. There’s not stuff lying around on the floor because the people pushing carts would run into that. There’s no floating plastic bags going around. And largely it’s not in the interest of the people who work there to be malicious to the robot,” he said.

Brooks explains that it’s also about robots and humans working together, so his company designed these robots for practical purposes related to warehouse operations, as opposed to building a human-looking robot. In this case, it looks like a shopping cart with a handle.

“So the form factor we use is not humanoids walking around — even though I have built and delivered more humanoids than anyone else. These look like shopping carts,” he said. “It’s got a handlebar, so if there’s a problem with the robot, a person can grab the handlebar and do what they wish with it,” he said.

After all these years, Brooks has learned that it’s about making the technology accessible and purpose-built. “I always try to make technology easy for people to understand, and therefore we can deploy it at scale, and always look at the business case; the return on investment is also very important.”

Even with that, Brooks says we have to accept that there are always going to be hard-to-solve outlier cases when it comes to AI, that could take decades to solve. “Without carefully boxing in how an AI system is deployed, there is always a long tail of special cases that take decades to discover and fix. Paradoxically all those fixes are AI complete themselves.”

Brooks adds that there’s this mistaken belief, mostly thanks to Moore’s law, that there will always be exponential growth when it comes to technology — the idea that if ChatGPT 4 is this good, imagine what ChatGPT 5, 6 and 7 will be like. He sees this flaw in that logic, that tech doesn’t always grow exponentially, in spite of Moore’s law.

He uses the iPod as an example. For a few iterations, it did in fact double in storage size from 10 all the way to 160GB. If it had continued on that trajectory, he figured out we would have an iPod with 160TB of storage by 2017, but of course we didn’t. The models being sold in 2017 actually came with 256GB or 160GB because, as he pointed out, nobody actually needed more than that.

Brooks acknowledges that LLMs could help at some point with domestic robots, where they could perform specific tasks, especially with an aging population and not enough people to take care of them. But even that, he says, could come with its own set of unique challenges.

“People say, ‘Oh, the large language models are gonna make robots be able to do things they couldn’t do.’ That’s not where the problem is. The problem with being able to do stuff is about control theory and all sorts of other hardcore math optimization,” he said.

Brooks explains that this could eventually lead to robots with useful language interfaces for people in care situations. “It’s not useful in the warehouse to tell an individual robot to go out and get one thing for one order, but it may be useful for eldercare in homes for people to be able to say things to the robots,” he said.

Iran’s presidential run-off pits reformist against hardliner

After a record low turnout, the second round will offer a stark choice in a country beset by economic malaise

Iran will hold a run-off presidential election on Friday after no candidate managed to attract half the votes in a poll marred by a record low turnout. 

The second round will offer voters a stark choice between a reformist promising to improve relations with the west and ease social restrictions, and a hardliner intent on consolidating conservatives’ grip on power.

Masoud Pezeshkian, a reformist former health minister, secured 42 per cent of the votes announced on Saturday while Saeed Jalili, a regime stalwart who was the most ideologically hardline of three conservative candidates, garnered 38 per cent, according to the interior ministry. 

But the turnout of just 40 per cent will dominate political discourse ahead of the second round, with the absence of voters sending a rebuke to both reformers and hardliners within the Islamic republic. 

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, said on Friday that a high turnout was an “absolute necessity” and that Iran’s “durability, stability, honour and dignity in the world” depended on people’s votes.

The election comes at a crucial time for the regime amid heightened tensions with the west triggered by the Israel-Hamas war and Tehran’s expansion of its nuclear programme. The republic is also preparing for the eventual succession when Khamenei, 85, dies.

The emergency vote was held after hardline president Ebrahim Raisi, a cleric and potential successor to Khamenei, died in a helicopter crash last month.

Reformist politicians had been energised by the authorities’ surprise decision to allow Pezeshkian’s candidacy after the presidential election in 2021 and this year’s parliamentary poll saw leading reformist and centrist contenders barred from competing.

But many voters who would typically back a moderate candidate have grown increasingly disillusioned with their leaders, angered by the country’s economic malaise, social restrictions and isolation from the west. They have given up on the notion that change can come from within the regime and are loath to be seen to be legitimising the theocratic system through the ballot box.

The mood darkened after the 2021 presidential vote that brought Raisi to power, with many believing the result was preordained as leading reformists were prevented from competing. Turnout at that election was 48 per cent, the lowest for a presidential poll since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

The following year, mass anti-regime protests erupted after Mahsa Amini, 22, died in police custody after being arrested for allegedly not wearing her hijab properly. This year, social media campaigns have urged people not to vote, saying it would be a betrayal of those killed during the crackdown on demonstrations.

As a result, not voting has become a form of silent protest against the regime in a nation with a youthful population.

“Iranian society has completely transformed since 2022 [since the Amini protests],” said Mohammad-Reza Javadi-Yeganeh, a sociologist, in a post on X. “Neither the theoretical frameworks nor previous methods of opinion polls are capable of understanding the new society.”

Reformist politicians will cling to the hope that in a run-off between Pezeshkian and Jalili, more Iranians will be mobilised to go to the polls.

Pezeshkian, 69, has promised to revive negotiations with the US to resolve Tehran’s nuclear stand-off with the west and secure sanctions relief, while also suggesting he would ease social restrictions, including a more relaxed stance towards compulsory hijabs for women.

But Jalili, 58, will be betting that his chances are bolstered now that he is the sole hardliner running and hoping that the conservative base will unite around him.

Typically, hardline candidates withdraw from the race to rally behind the leading candidate shortly before voters go to the poll. This time, however, neither Jalili, nor Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the other leading hardliner who was trailing in third, were willing to step aside despite pressure from within their camp, splitting the conservative vote.

Ghalibaf threw his weight behind Jalili after the results were announced.

If Jalili is victorious, analysts warned that he would enforce social restrictions more rigorously and be more hostile to any engagement with the US or other western powers.

While Pezeshkian and Ghalibaf suggested they would be open to negotiations with the west, Jalili told supporters that he would “use the existing economic potential to make the enemy regret imposing sanctions [on Iran]”.

Although important foreign policy and domestic decisions are determined by the supreme leader, the president can influence the tone of government both in the republic and in its foreign engagements.

But the challenge for Pezeshkian will be convincing wary Iranians that he can make a difference as president in a system where the supreme leader has ultimate authority and elected and unelected hardline centres of power, including the elite Revolutionary Guards, have significant sway over foreign and domestic policy.

“We don’t see any reason for voting,” said Saba, a 22-year-old student. “No one can change things, they [the president] are just a small part of a big circle and no one can change it.”

Investment of up to $5bn in US start-up Rivian an effort to reboot software ambitions and North American presence

Two decades ago Oliver Blume did a PhD in Shanghai under the supervision of Wan Gang, who as China’s minister for science and technology later became the driving force behind the country’s electric vehicle revolution.

Now Blume, chief executive of both Volkswagen and Porsche, must safeguard two of Germany’s biggest industrial names from the achievements of his former professor, which gave rise to Chinese EV industry champions from carmaker BYD to battery giant CATL.

The key challenge Blume faces is how almost century-old companies that pride themselves on the quality of their hardware reinvent themselves for the coming age in which vehicles are electric and reliant on software.

The 56-year-old this week made one of his boldest moves yet as Volkswagen announced an investment of up to $5bn in Californian EV start-up Rivian. The two groups will form a joint venture to develop new software and Volkswagen will immediately gain access to Rivian’s EV architecture.

“In terms of a big tech transformation, you can’t do it all on your own”, he told the Financial Times. “It should be a win-win situation . . . The motivation from our side is to speed up software transformation at Volkswagen in all our brands. Rivian has best in class architecture . . . Volkswagen has the scale”.

Volkswagen, which owns most of Porsche, is struggling with intense difficulties in the shift to electric vehicles just as it faces a rapid decline of its dominance in China and a struggle to make serious inroads in the US.

The Rivian deal has been hailed by the US company’s investors as a lifeline, sending its shares up more than 30 per cent, but some Volkswagen shareholders are concerned over the scale of the investment — almost half the group’s estimated net cash flow for the year.

However, observers said the move showed an acceptance that Volkswagen’s attempts to develop software had not succeeded, and that the company needed to look elsewhere to catch up with digital native carmakers such as Tesla and BYD. 

Born in Braunschweig, a short drive from VW’s Wolfsburg headquarters, Blume studied mechanical engineering at the city’s technical university before joining Audi in 1994 as an intern. Over the following years he worked his way up through the VW group, including a stint as head of production for the Seat brand in Spain, where he still has a house.

He is held in high esteem by many of his colleagues. Daniela Cavallo, chair of Volkswagen Group’s works council — the body representing the interests of the company’s 680,000-strong global workforce made up of elected workers and management — calls him a “true team player”, hailing his “clear strategy” and trustworthiness.

When the Porsche CEO was handed the reins of its parent company in 2022, becoming the only person to head two Dax 40 companies simultaneously, Blume inherited Volkswagen’s halting attempt to build out EV software in Germany with its subsidiary Cariad. 

“From an investor’s perspective, the whole Cariad solution was basically associated with delays, failure, extensive cost, and an environment which caused quite a stir within the Volkswagen world,” said a senior executive at one large European asset manager. “In contrast to his predecessor, Oliver Blume did not see the benefits of ‘Software made in Wolfsburg’.”

Blume in January also spearheaded a historic partnership with Chinese EV maker Xpeng to jointly develop a new generation of EVs, essentially moving the company’s Chinese software development out of Germany too. 

“We have taken a lot of important decisions in the last year and a half,” Blume said. “It’s up to us to combine our heritage with this future technology.”

The Rivian partnership is an effort both to address the company’s software development problem and give the company a larger foothold in the US premium market, where rivals Mercedes, BMW and Tesla do better.

“Blume may be looking to be the first CEO to divert more attention to North America than his predecessors,” said Matthias Schmidt, an independent auto analyst. “If he can succeed here it could arguably be just as large a step as when former Volkswagen CEO Carl Hahn [from 1982 to 1993] decided to double down on China.”

The strategy is all the more essential given that Volkswagen is rapidly losing market share in China, going from almost 20 per cent in 2020 to 15 per cent last year.

“We need especially this [move] in North America in order to be better balanced between the regions,” said Blume, referring to the three main sales markets of China, Europe and North America.

His predecessor Herbert Diess thought the solution was to revive Scout, a cult American marque of the 1960s and 1970s whose brand VW acquired in 2021, to push into the US. Blume will be hoping the outdoorsy Rivian brand, whose SUVs and pick-up trucks start at roughly $80,000, could be a better entry point.

Blume is a keen player and watcher of tennis. One colleague and tennis partner told the FT Blume was a methodical player, first exchanging three or four shots before building to a winner.

Industry insiders say he is unlike previous Volkswagen bosses, who through sheer force of personality managed to exert their will on the various factions in Wolfsburg. 

“VW is a company that thrives on the strongman — full of towering egos and strong brands,” said one carmaking veteran who knows Blume. “Oliver is softly spoken, and actually listens to people. The question at VW is, can a nice guy prevail? Especially when he has more difficult decisions to make than his predecessors?”

Tracy Cohen is alleging consumer fraud and false business practices against her former employer.

A former Gucci store employee in Chicago has filed a civil class action amended lawsuit alleging consumer fraud and false business practice.

Tracy Cohen, who worked in the Chicago store for 18 years, took legal action Wednesday against Kering Americas and Gucci America in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Ill. She is demanding a jury trial. Cohen joined the company in August 2006 and exited in October 2023. During her tenure, she claimed to have generated more than $50 million in sales and was the top-performing Chicago store employee for six consecutive years from 2017-2023.

This is the second time this year that Cohen has taken legal action against both parties. In a complaint filed in the Northern District of Illinois in late January, she alleged that she was subject to discriminatory comments about her age and mental health, while employed by Gucci.

A Gucci spokesperson said Friday, “We are aware of the recent lawsuit that has been filed by Ms. Cohen. As company policy, we do not comment on pending litigation or publicly disclose information about former or current employees. We plan to vigorously defend this action in court.”

Cohen claimed that she was trained to perform a “selling ceremony” when presenting exotic skinned bags. That allegedly involved putting on black gloves and then telling the customer that “the skins were sourced ethically; the snakes and crocodiles were not tortured; the snake skins were obtained through a natural shedding process; and the hides are a byproduct of the meat industry; and, we only work with suppliers that have certified humane treatment of animals.”

Her “trusting customers” then “relied on her representations, and as a result, she sold countless Gucci products, crafted from ‘exotic’ crocodile/alligator and python skins, including but not limited to men’s loafers, women’s sandals, wallets, luggage, and handbags,” according to the complaint.

Cohen’s filing also cited that Kering Americas and Gucci America publicly posted their Code of Ethics, claiming ethics is at the heart of their business conduct and that they have a “powerful moral commitment,” as well as a “culture of integrity.”

In this week’s filing, Cohen claimed that she never would have deceived her customers or personally purchased python-skin bags and shoes over several years had she known of alleged practices of violently killing the pythons.

Her more recent filing was prompted by news coverage of an investigation by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ Asia division into two python farms in Thailand that allegedly provided exotic skins to the Kering-owned Caravel and had uncovered “abusive python killing practices.” Those two farms were said to be Sisatchanalai Python Farm and Closed-Cycle Breeding International.

Cohen is seeking emotional distress damages, which would only be awarded by a jury, and compensation for the exotic skin Gucci products that she purchased, as well as potentially those that were sold to her customers, according to one of her attorneys, Tamara Holder-DeMaio. Cohen’s four python purchases — two pairs of shoes and two bags — were estimated to be worth less than $10,000, said Holder-DeMaio.

As for Cohen’s earlier complaint, which includes claims of trafficking as well as discrimination, due to off-hours work, she is seeking the maximum amount of damages for the numerous counts, her lawyer said. Cohen’s monthly sales goal of $300,000 “was humanly impossible to achieve while working in the store,” she added. A status report is due July 1 for that case, and the first court date for the class action filing is scheduled for October, Holder-DeMaio said.

This week’s filing said that Cohen “truly loved selling Gucci’s products” and her “dream was to one day earn a promotion that placed her in Italy, working for Gucci.“

²“Nobody really needs couture, to be honest,” said Demna after his Balenciaga haute couture show this week in Paris. No, most people do not need a bespoke gown that costs six figures and takes highly trained petites mains thousands of hours to make by hand. And yet.

Partaking in the official haute couture fashion week in Paris—which is rife with arcane rules about how the clothes are made—can pay off handsomely for the few designers left in the club. For the 15 or so brands that invest in the game, including Dior and Chanel, couture can multiply press and red-carpet opportunities, and have a trickle-down effect on sales of ready-to-wear and beauty and fragrance.