☕️ Perplexity's stealth crawlers exposed

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.

In today's Techpresso:

🕵️ Perplexity accused of scraping websites that explicitly blocked AI scraping

😏 Google mocks Apple's delayed AI in new Pixel ad

❌ TSMC employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process

💥 DeepMind reveals Genie 3, a world model that could be the key to reaching AGI

🧠 ChatGPT will now remind you to take breaks

📹 Elon Musk says he’s bringing back Vine’s archive

🎁 + 11 other news you might like

🔮 + 6 handpicked research papers and tools

FROM OUR PARTNER

• Cloudflare accuses Perplexity of deploying deceptive “stealth crawlers” to scrape content from websites, intentionally bypassing publisher rules that explicitly block the AI firm’s officially declared `PerplexityBot` crawlers.
• The security firm's report claims Perplexity’s undeclared bots impersonate standard web browsers using a generic macOS Chrome user agent while rotating IP addresses to deliberately hide their scraping activity.
• Following an experiment where Perplexity scraped secret domains despite `robots.txt` blocks, Cloudflare has removed the AI firm from its verified bot program and is now actively blocking the activity.

• In a new Pixel 10 ad, Google openly mocks Apple's delayed AI features for the iPhone 16, suggesting you could "just change your phone" instead of waiting a full year.
• The advertisement targets Apple's failure to deliver the Siri upgrade with Apple Intelligence, a key feature promised for the iPhone 16 that is still not available almost a year later.
• A Bloomberg report attributes Apple's AI delays to problems with Siri's hybrid architecture, with the company now working on a new version with an updated architecture for a bigger upgrade.

• TSMC fired several employees and is pursuing legal action after they were caught attempting to steal trade secrets about the company's 2-nanometer chip development and production process.
• This 2nm process is the same technology expected to be used for manufacturing the A20 chips for the future iPhone 18 lineup, with Apple getting priority access.
• Taiwanese prosecutors are investigating the former workers, who were discovered after TSMC detected "unusual access patterns" during routine monitoring and now may face criminal prosecution for their actions.

• Google DeepMind's Genie 3 is a general purpose foundation world model that generates multiple minutes of interactive 3D environments at 720p from a simple text prompt.
• The auto-regressive model remembers what it previously generated to maintain physical consistency, an emergent capability that allows for new "promptable world events" to alter the simulation mid-stream.
• DeepMind believes this is a key step toward AGI because it creates a consistent training ground for embodied agents to learn physics and general tasks through simulated trial and error.

• OpenAI is adding mental health guardrails to ChatGPT that will encourage users to take breaks from the service during lengthy chats to help manage their emotional well-being.
• The new guardrails will also cause the chatbot to give less direct advice, a significant change in its communication style designed to better support people who are using it.
• These changes coincide with OpenAI releasing its first research paper, which investigates how interacting with ChatGPT affects the emotional well-being of the people who use the AI service.

• Elon Musk posted on X that his company found the supposedly deleted Vine video archive and is now working to restore user access to the platform's six-second looping videos.
• The announcement follows a 2022 poll where the X owner asked about reviving the app, which Twitter acquired for $30 million in 2012 before shutting it down four years later.
• Musk's post also promoted the Grok Imagine AI feature for X Premium+ subscribers as an "AI Vine," suggesting the announcement could be a way to draw attention to new tools.

Other news & articles you might like

• ChatGPT is set to reach 700 million weekly users this week LINK

• Google is scaling back its power usage for AI data centers as U.S. grid becomes strained LINK

• Palantir hits $1 billion quarter milestone thanks to AI, says $1 trillion is the goal LINK

• xAI’s new Grok image and video generator has a ‘spicy’ mode LINK

• Rethinking how we measure AI intelligence LINK

• OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic get green light for civilian AI use in US; soon could power government workdesks LINK

• Google's new AI-powered bug hunting tool finds major issues in open source software LINK

• US Explores Location Trackers for AI Chips, Official Says LINK

• Uzbekistan’s first unicorn, Uzum, leaps to a $1.5B valuation LINK

• Apple exec says Siri will get ‘much bigger upgrade than we envisioned’ LINK

• Scientists are growing tumors in space to study how to personalize cancer treatment LINK

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