Bezos baraat arrives in Venice!

Written by: Aarthi Ramnath, Raghav Bikhchandani & Yash Budhwar

Bezos baraat arrives in Venice!

A year after the never-ending Ambani shaadi roadshow, the world will be subjected to Jeff Bezos’ Amazonian wedding to Lauren Sanchez. The 200 guests include Kim Kardashian, Oprah Winfrey, Mick Jagger and Ivanka Trump—who are already flying in on 95 private jets for a $74 million three-day event. The actual shaadi is on Saturday. Sadly, we won’t know the deets until the Amazonian spectacle kicks off later today.

Not feeling the nuptial bliss: The Venetians. The city already has a huge overtourism problem. Its population is just over 50,000 but attracts over 20 million tourists each year, or 150,000 per day (see: our Big Story). The ‘No Space for Bezos’ campaign is already underway:

They are already exasperated by a crush of tourists and doubly fed up with the world’s superrich using the lagoon as a backdrop. “It’s absurd to treat this city like it’s Disneyland,” said Grazia Satta, a retired teacher and social worker. “The message this wedding sends is that rich people can do whatever they want. We shouldn’t kneel before wealth like this.”

FYI: the ‘space’ bit is a pun—not on overtourism—but on Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket, as you can see here:

And this is what the invite looks like (like something designed on Canva, so not exactly the grand Ambani wedding invites):

Not feeling the rage: Venetian authorities—salivating at the prospect of all that billionaire cash. As they point out, “These are not tourists who come for a couple of hours and then leave with a sandwich in their hands.” Yup, overtourism is only a problem when you have too many broke losers.

One small victory: Activists also threatened to fill the canals with inflatable crocodiles to block the guests from entering the wedding venue—a sixteenth century building in the city centre. The ceremony has now shifted to a 14th century complex of former shipyards on the outskirts called Arsenale. FWIW, it’s where the Venice Biennale was held—so it ought to be good enough for Jeff.

Where we are now: All the other ‘protestniks’ have joined the party—including Greenpeace and Everyone Hates Elon (?!). So ungrateful when the happy couple has donated ‘unspecified amounts’ to UNESCO Venice, a lagoon restoration group and a local university—on behalf of their guests.

The big picture: Once there were Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: conquest, war, famine, and death. Now we have a fifth: The billionaire wedding.

Reading list: Hollywood Reporter and CNN has more on the closely-guarded plans for the super-wedding, while The Guardian and Associated Press report on the protests. Also in CNN: a design critique of the wedding invite. We must say Venice does offer a very scenic backdrop for protest banners—as you can see below.

‘Retrained’ Grok aims to please Elon

The big sell for AI chatbots is that the machine is ‘neutral’—prone to inventing facts, yes, but not skewing them left or right. Well, that might change—at least for Grok. The reason: Its master Elon Musk doesn’t like its answers—and thinks it should be sent back to re-education, sorry, retraining camp:

We will use Grok 3.5... which has advanced reasoning, to rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors. Then retrain on that. Far too much garbage in any foundation model trained on uncorrected data.

Point to note: Grok is already showing signs of reflecting Musk’s pet peeves:

Last month, Grok started injecting references to "white genocide" in South Africa to unrelated conversations, which the company later attributed to an "unauthorized change" to the company's system.

FYI: ‘White genocide’ is the term used to falsely claim white farmers are being slaughtered in South Africa.

Next gen chatbots: Right now, it’s fairly easy to catch obvious errors made by AI chatbots—which often ‘hallucinate’. What Musk is suggesting is way more “sophisticated… ways to inject preferences that could be both more pervasive and harder to detect”:

The most obvious way is to change the data that models are trained on, focusing on data sources that align with one's goals. "That would be fairly expensive but I wouldn't put them past them to try," says AI researcher and Humane Intelligence CEO Rumman Chowdhury.

Experts like Chowdhury say big tech is already trying to figure out how to manipulate chatbots to appeal to users: “Elon is just dumb enough to say the quiet part out loud.”

We always aim to please: Other researchers are raising alarm about the “subtle but serious risk of AI ‘sycophancy’.” This is when chatbots tend to agree with their users—to flatter them even when they are wrong:

[R]esearch has found that overly agreeable behavior is a potential problem for all artificial-intelligence assistants and could be reinforcing biases, undermining learning and even interfering with critical decision-making.

Also: Do we need chatbots to reinforce echo chambers? We already only talk to people we agree with. TechCrunch has more on AI sycophancy. (Axios)

Sticking to AI-related worries: Two key court rulings offer a rude surprise to all those suing tech companies for violating copyright laws (example: authors, news outlets etc). In one judgement, a judge ruled that Anthropic can use a book—without the author’s permission—as long as they buy the book:

Judge William Alsup compared the Anthropic model’s use of books to a “reader aspiring to be a writer” who uses works “not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them” but to “turn a hard corner and create something different.”

Of course, this romantic view only focuses on the sin of piracy. Hence, you must buy it to train on it. What about the other P-word—plagiarism? Right now, all a chatbot does is regurgitate other people’s content—albeit in slightly different words. And makes money from it. That isn’t quite the same as diligent humans reading books for knowledge.

As for the other judgement: A San Francisco judge has thrown out a copyright infringement lawsuit from a group of 13 authors—incuding Sarah Silverman, Jacqueline Woodson and Ta-Nehisi Coates. The silver lining: The judge said the plaintiffs made the “wrong argument”—and suggested better grounds for suing the next time around. The Guardian has more on Anthropic. AP via The Hindu reports on the SF ruling.

A damning Harvard report on ‘Gaza aid’

A Harvard Dataverse report by Yaakov Garb reveals that at least 377,000 Gazans have gone missing since October 2023—nearly half of whom are children. Reminder: The total population of Gaza is 2.2 million. The report used Israeli military estimates and satellite-based maps to track the current number of residents—hence, the number that are still “unaccounted for.” This is the first evidence-based claim that the Israeli military is ‘disappearing’ vast numbers of Gazans.

Data point to note: The official death toll reported in the media is 56,000.

The greater horror: The report also lays out in detail how the IDF uses recently established aid centres—all adjacent to Israeli military installations—to control and terrorise Palestinians. The location is key:

According to Israeli estimates mapped in the report, most of Gaza’s remaining population, especially those in Gaza City are physically unable to reach these aid compounds. Residents’ would need to walk across rubble-filled wastelands, cross the militarized Netzarim corridor, and enter “buffer zones” in which entry is officially banned and “liable to attack.”

Btw, the aid centre itself is designed as a chokepoint—only one entry and exit—making it easy to corral and kill (as in farms). But here is the cruellest bit:

The allocations themselves are calculated to feed 5.5 people for 3.5 days, requiring continuous and repeated movement into these dangerous spaces, creating a cycle of dependency, vulnerability, and potential violence. “This setup seems likely to generate a cycle of security incidents that are then claimed to justify soldiers shooting and killing aid-seekers,”he said.

That’s how the IDF routinely kills 50-plus starving Gazans every day. It’s literally like shooting fish in a barrel. You can read more about the study in Maktoob Media, and the full report here.

Ladies & gentlemen, we have a new blood type!

Only one known person has this rare blood type—discovered in a woman from the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. It all started in 2011 when doctors first noticed an unusual antibody during a routine examination. It took another eight years to get around to performing high-end DNA diagnostic tests—to figure out what was going on. So now along with A, B and O—we have… PIGZ? Yup, that’s the official name, really! Mercifully, it has a nicer nickname: ‘Gwada Negative’ (as in Guadaloupe).

The curious bit: The woman’s siblings have a different blood group—purely through genetic accident:

[S]he possessed a unique blood-related mutation inherited from both her parents. Her blood type appears to be the result of having both copies of this mutation, since her siblings have one copy and don’t have it.

The bad news for Ms Gwada Negative: “She is the only person in the world who is compatible with herself.” (Gizmodo)

what caught our eye

business & tech

New data released by open source group LAION is highlighting the race to build more empathetic AI language models.
Due to AI, the traditional hiring process has become overwhelmed with automated noise—the résumé equivalent of AI slop.
Nvidia’s back on top—after a 40% slump, the AI chip giant has hit a record high and reclaimed its crown as the world’s most valuable company.
Tesla’s European sales are sliding—registrations are down nearly 28% even as the rest of the EU’s EV market picks up speed.
Bumble is cutting 30% of its global staff—under returning CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd, the dating app plans to save $40 million and double down on product revamps.
A second report from a major academic institution has found how Uber used dynamic pricing for its own profit—at the cost of its drivers and users.

sports & entertainment

Prime Video has greenlit a second season of “The Traitors,” following the breakout success of the Indian adaptation of the BAFTA and Emmy Award-winning global format.
Nine-year-old prodigy Aarit Kapil held world #1 Magnus Carlsen to a draw at the 'Early Titled Tuesday' chess tournament.
The Guardian has a good read on why smashing six sixes in a Test over is a one-in-13-trillion miracle we may never see.
Rishabh Pant has climbed to a career-best #7 in the ICC Test rankings. Since his return from injury, his brand value has jumped by nearly 75%—with ad rates now at Rs 2.5 crore for a solo shoot and up to Rs 4.75 crore for two-day deals.

health & environment

US health secretary RFK Jr has pulled funding from global vaccine group Gavi, saying it ignored the science behind childhood immunization.
A breakthrough HIV shot for young women in Africa is now in limbo—derailed by these US funding cuts despite hopes for a game-changing rollout this year.
In other dismal news for vaccination coverage, India had an estimated 1.44 million “zero‑dose” children in 2023—those who received no vaccines at all—as global childhood immunisation efforts continue to stall, according to The Lancet.
Strange signals detected from the Antarctic ice appear to defy the laws of physics—with scientists searching for and hoping to find the answer.
Phys looks at cats’ preferred sleeping position and why that could be part of a survival strategy.

Iran vs Israel

Trump says the US will kick off nuclear talks with Iran next week.
Days after bombing Iran, Trump says China can keep buying its oil—while hoping it picks up plenty from the US too.
Ukrainian forces found a white, AI-powered drone with Iranian tech and labels—pointing to deeper Russia-Iran ties, even as Putin stays silent on helping Iran in its war with Israel.
The Iranian parliament has approved a bill to suspend cooperation with the UN’s nuclear watchdog.

meanwhile, in the world

Israeli strikes kill 78 in Gaza—including 14 near aid centres—even as Trump claims “great progress” in ending the onslaught.
Turkey has arrested 158 military staff suspected of links to Fethullah Gulen, who was accused of masterminding a failed 2016 coup.
The Trump administration will provide $30 million to the Israeli-backed group distributing food in Gaza, in what is the first such US-backed funding of the organisation.
Trump also said he used a trade deal threat to broker the ceasefire between India and Pakistan—listing it among conflicts he claims to have “settled.”
The Washington Post is letting people quoted in its climate stories add their own annotations—part of a new effort to boost reader engagement as it faces financial pressure.
A cargo ship carrying thousands of vehicles sank in the Pacific Ocean on June 23, weeks after a fire broke out onboard.
The cathedral of St Paul in London marks its 350th anniversary with a rare glimpse into its inner sanctum.
Models in Colombia allege that the country’s sexcam industry recruited them while they were underaged schoolgirls.

meanwhile, in India

India ranks “high risk” for police torture and ill-treatment in the first-ever Global Torture Index released by the World Organization Against Torture.
Two leopards were at the centre of back-to-back incidents on social media, one who was sick paraded like a pet in Rajasthan for selfies and the other wrestled and pelted with bricks in Uttar Pradesh.

Four things to see

One: The much-delayed Axiom Space rocket finally headed out to the International Space Station—carrying four astronauts from different countries. Of these, Hungary, India and Poland have never sent an astronaut to the ISS. Representing India—and Lucknow—is Air Force pilot Shubhanshu Shukla. He is now the second Indian to go to space—41 years after Rakesh Sharma took to the stars in 1984. Our man Shukla had exactly the right comment to mark the occasion—“Kya kamaal ki ride thi” (what an amazing ride)—as you can see below. This Hindu article has more on what the crew will do during their journey to the ISS. And The Telegraph has a good profile on Shukla. (New York Times)

Two: Move over Barack. There’s a new Democratic orator in town: Zohran Mamdani—who gave this stirring speech two days before his historic victory in the Democratic primary for the mayoral race in NYC. Al Jazeera offers analysis of what this victory means and why it may be a harbinger of a new American Left. Wall Street Journal (splainer gift link) looks at Wall Street’s panic over the prospect of a socialist running New York City lol!

Three: Here’s a useful PSA: the ‘best place to have herpes’ is… New Zealand! That’s the message of the Kiwi ad that won the top prize at Cannes Lions aka the Cannes for advertisements. Watch the hilarious retro-style ad below. (The Guardian)

Four: Steve Coogan returns to the big screen later this year with the sports drama-biopic ‘Saipan’—playing football manager Mick McCarthy. Set during the 2002 FIFA World Cup hosted by Japan and South Korea, the film focuses on an infamous row between McCarthy and Manchester United star, Roy Keane. The film doesn’t yet have a set release date but it is expected to be near the end of 2025. Check out the teaser below. (The Guardian)