☕️ Amazon demands Perplexity stop its AI agent from making purchases

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.

In today's Techpresso:

🤖 Amazon demands Perplexity stop its AI agent from making purchases

💻 Apple to launch a 'cheap' MacBook in 2026

📉 Big Short investor makes $1.1 billion bet against AI

🛰️ Google plans orbital AI data centers

🎥 OpenAI launches its Sora app on Android

🤝 Google settles with Epic to change the Play Store

🎁 + 22 other news & articles you might like

🔮 + 6 handpicked research papers and tools

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• Amazon issued a legal threat demanding Perplexity stop its AI shopping assistant, Comet, from using the e-commerce site for violating terms of service by not identifying itself as an agent.
• Perplexity claims its agent has the same permissions as a person, but Amazon says third-party applications making purchases for customers must operate openly and identify themselves as bots.
• This dispute sets a precedent where Amazon claims the right to decide if it will allow external shopping bots, like Comet, which could compete with its own tool called Rufus.

• Apple is reportedly creating a lower-cost MacBook, codenamed J700, scheduled for release in early 2026 to compete against popular Chromebooks from Google for the education market.
• To sell for well under $1,000, the new machine will use an iPhone’s A-series processor and a lower-end LCD display that is slightly smaller than the current MacBook Air.
• This move creates an entry-level Mac category, branching Apple's silicon strategy with an A-series chip that prioritizes cost over the raw processing power found in M-series models.

• Michael Burry’s hedge fund Scion Asset Management has placed significant bets against the AI sector by purchasing put options on industry darlings Nvidia and the data analytics firm Palantir.
• Through social media posts, Burry draws parallels to the dot-com bubble, pointing to similar U.S. tech capex growth and the subsequent telecommunications crash as a historical warning for investors.
• The investor also shared a diagram of the AI industry's circular dealmaking, suggesting the market is a tangled web of multibillion-dollar investments between a handful of overlapping tech giants.

• Google's Project Suncatcher aims to create AI data centers in space using satellites with Tensor Processing Unit chips, which will operate on constant solar power in a sun-synchronous low-Earth orbit.
• To work as one system, the satellites will use free-space optical links for high-speed data transfer and fly in a very close formation, separated by just hundreds of meters.
• The plan's success depends on launch costs dropping below $200 per kilogram, and Google is partnering with Planet to launch two prototype satellites to test the concept by early 2027.

• OpenAI’s AI video generator app, Sora, has officially launched on the Google Play Store for Android users in the U.S., Canada, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam.
• The Android version keeps all iOS features, including "Cameos" for creating self-likeness videos, and includes a TikTok-style feed for sharing and discovering content from other people.
• Sora has faced criticism over deepfakes and copyrighted characters, but OpenAI plans future updates like basic video editing tools and expanded character cameos featuring pets and inanimate objects.

• Google’s settlement with Epic lets Android app developers direct users to alternative payment mechanisms inside their apps and through external web links, a significant change for the Play Store.
• The deal also caps the fees the search giant can charge for these payments at either nine percent or twenty percent, with the actual rate based on the transaction type.
• After a jury found Google had stifled competition, Epic Games' CEO praised the proposal and announced the Epic Games Store for Android would be coming to the Google Play Store.

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