Isabella Vincenza, one of CloudKitchens’ earliest employees, never imagined she would be suing her now-former employer.

Hired as a full-time salesperson in 2018, she became a mainstay at President’s Club dinners hosted by CEO Travis Kalanick at his Bel Air home throughout 2020 and 2021. These dinners were prized, invite-only events for top salespeople at CloudKitchens, a company that provides delivery-only commercial kitchens known as “ghost kitchens.”

The gatherings started with cocktails by the pool. Then the partygoers would mingle indoors until they sat for a chef-prepared dinner. Vincenza recalled Kalanick would greet her with a hug and praise her work. Sometimes, he would invite her to sit near him during dinner and they would chat throughout the meal.

“If you were the best salesperson, you were his favorite person because you were making the company a lot of money,” Vincenza told TechCrunch, adding that she was also CloudKitchens’ first female salesperson. 

In August 2022, she arrived at one President’s Club dinner visibly pregnant. When she tried to sit across from Kalanick at the dinner, she recalled him asking her to move over. She said he hardly looked at her, would not engage in conversation, and didn’t say goodbye. Vincenza left the dinner unsettled.

“That was the beginning of me being a pariah,” Vincenza told TechCrunch.

She and another describe a “boys’ club”

Vincenza was fired in July 2023, a bit over six months after returning from maternity leave, according to her lawsuit and the company.

After receiving a right-to-sue letter from California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing in August 2024, she filed the suit in Los Angeles Superior Court. In it she named Kalanick and two other executives, CloudKitchens’ parent company City Storage Systems, and its associate company CSS Payroll as defendants. The suit alleges wrongful termination, sex discrimination, and a hostile work environment, among other claims. TechCrunch has obtained a copy. 

Vincenza claims in her suit that she spent years “dodging all of her employer’s sexist curveballs,” that the “office culture was that of a boys’ club,” and alleges she received less pay and a smaller equity grant than her male counterparts. She also claims she was “retaliated against for standing up for herself” following her pregnancy and subsequent maternity leave. 

The company rejects her allegations. “Isabella Vincenza had one of the highest salaries amongst hundreds of account executives, yet in the last year of her tenure at the company she was one of the lowest performers,” company spokesperson Devon Spurgeon told TechCrunch. Spurgeon added that an “internal company review” found Vincenza’s claims of discrimination “to have no merit and the irony of all of this is that the fabricated and fraudulent allegations were against the people who were her biggest supporters.” Spurgeon also denied that the seating arrangements for the President’s Club dinner were influenced by Vincenza’s pregnancy, and said seating was a reflection of the seniority of people in attendance.

Vincenza’s lawsuit echoes some of the allegations that led Kalanick to step down as CEO of Uber in 2017 after Susan Fowler’s viral blog post sparked an investigation into that workplace’s culture. The investigation revealed a culture so rampant with gender discrimination and workplace harassment that Uber fired more than 20 people later that year. While Kalanick himself wasn’t personally accused of sexual discrimination or harassment, shortly after the report and firings, Kalanick resigned. 

In 2018, he bought a controlling interest in City Storage Systems, owner of CloudKitchens, became CSS’s CEO, and brought some ex-Uber employees along with him. By 2021, some employees felt CloudKitchens’ workplace was Uber all over again, with long hours and a boys’-club mentality; with one executive, the head of recruiting, resigning after an internal misconduct investigation, according to reports in Business Insider that year.

TechCrunch has viewed Slack messages from 2022, unrelated to Vincenza’s case, in which employees were cajoled for not being at work after 7 p.m.; male employees were openly messaging about another male employee having sex; and CloudKitchens co-founder Barak Diskin used a dating profile-style shirtless photo of himself for his Slack profile photo.

Female employees have sued CloudKitchens before. One woman sued alleging unfair labor practices like being forced to work overtime without pay, and being denied meal breaks. Another sued claiming gender and race-based pay discrimination (Kalanick was also originally named in this suit but was later dropped as a defendant). The first case was moved to private arbitration; the second was settled in 2023.

These women are not the only ones who found CloudKitchens’ culture difficult. One former employee who worked in the Los Angeles office told TechCrunch that people were frequently fired and employees worked to the edge of burnout, sometimes staying in the office until 2 a.m. This employee, whose identity is known to TechCrunch, asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation.

This employee also used the words “boys’ club” to describe CloudKitchens’ culture. Slack messages viewed by TechCrunch showed employees using the N-word in a public group. At one point, someone hung a photoshopped picture of Donald Trump on the wall, showing him as a muscled, bare-chested boxer standing in a ring, complete with boxing gloves and a championship belt, according to a photo seen by TechCrunch. 

While Vincenza did not comment on those incidents, she did tell TechCrunch: “It was always a bro culture.”

Spurgeon denies the characterization of a boys’ club or bro culture, pointing out that women hold senior positions at the company, including the heads of HR, legal, and the enterprise sales team. She also said that the company has “no evidence” of Slack messages containing the N-word and that its policy is to “promptly” address and remove any inappropriate messages or photos brought to management’s attention.

Fired after going to HR

Vincenza’s lawsuit claims that in 2020, when Vincenza was a top sales performer, Jessica Morton — CloudKitchens’ head of business development and partnerships, and one of the other defendants in this suit — accidentally revealed on a Zoom call that two of Vincenza’s male teammates were being paid more than $20,000 more than Vincenza was. Afterward, Vincenza received a $5,000 pay increase. (Morton did not respond to TechCrunch’s requests for comment.) 

In addition to the dinners during the years before her maternity leave, Vincenza remembers routinely being praised at all-hands meetings where the top salespeople were named.

“It was a big deal,” Vincenza said. “You were a leader. You were an example. And I was presented that way to the rest of the company. ‘Isabella is number one.’” 

In January 2022, Vincenza informed her manager, as well as Kalanick, that she was pregnant and planning on taking maternity leave. Vincenza claims in the suit that her manager “insinuated” she could lose her job if she took leave, and reportedly asked how she was going to work while pregnant. While the company has a maternity leave policy, Vincenza says the company struggled to finalize details of how hers would be handled.

“Two days before I went on maternity leave, they couldn’t figure it out,” she said.

When she returned to work in January 2023 after her three-and-a-half month leave, the suit alleges Vincenza found that her largest accounts had been reassigned. The spokesperson says that her accounts were assigned to others in her absence but denies that the changes were punitive.

“Let me prove that I’m still number one,” Vincenza remembered telling herself after returning to work. For instance, salespeople were given a goal of closing at least one larger 5- to 10-kitchen deal — meaning signing a client that would rent multiple kitchens. One quarter, she says she was the only salesperson to land a 10-kitchen deal but received no public congratulations, nor an invite to the President’s Club, her suit alleges. Spurgeon says of the 10-kitchen deal that it never actually closed. “Nothing was actually signed. No funds were received by the company.”

Vincenza’s suit also alleges that Kalanick teased her once when she called home to check on her four-month-old during the day, and that leadership would call her or schedule meetings in the evenings and early mornings when they knew she was unavailable, which are also allegations the company denies. 

Vincenza says she went to HR in early 2023 to discuss her overall treatment since returning from maternity leave and was terminated shortly after. 

“She was not given any reprimands. She was not given a performance plan to review. The termination comes out of the blue,” Vincenza’s lawyer, Patrick Downes, a partner at Manteau Downes LLP, told TechCrunch. “This is really unheard of for a company of any size in California.”

The spokesperson denies this claim as well, saying Vincenza’s manager did have ongoing discussions about her performance.

As for why Vincenza decided to sue, given how difficult such lawsuits are to pursue, she says, “I don’t want other people to be treated that way at this company.” Then she added: “I don’t want this company to be that way for other moms, other women.” 

Sony has just revealed seven additional games that’ll get enhanced by its PS5 Pro, coming November 7th, on top of the games it previously revealed. New titles include Stellar Blade, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, F1 24, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, both Resident Evil Village and Resident Evil 4, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

That means the whole confirmed lineup so far has 20 Enhanced games, including:

But though it may not have been clear from Sony’s initial YouTube livestream unveiling, we’ve since seen that the PS5 Pro does legitimately promise graphical improvements over the original PS5, particularly in games that felt compromised on the original like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.

When games are explicitly patched for the new console, like the ones Sony has so far revealed, they should no longer require players to choose between a smooth 60 frames per second and a high level of detail: the PS5 Pro’s additional horsepower and AI-enhanced “PSSR” upscaling should mean you get both the high resolution and high frame rate modes of the original PS5 simultaneously.

Sony hasn’t yet revealed what resolutions or frame rates each of these enhanced games will run at internally. It has said it expects 40–50 games will have PS5 Pro patches by the time the system launches, and the PS5 Pro can still play PS4 and PS5 titles that haven’t been patched as well. Some may be able to run faster in a Boost Mode.

In the mid-1990s, former Apple exec Jean-Louis Gassée founded Be Inc., a company best known for its BeOS operating system.

Despite its technical strengths, which included a responsive multitasking kernel, symmetric multiprocessing, and a 64-bit journaling file system called BFS, BeOS struggled to make a dent in a market dominated by Microsoft Windows. Apple briefly considered buying it but ultimately decided the price was too steep, and went on instead to acquire Steve Jobs’ NeXT and use its OPENSTEP OS as the basis for what became Mac OS X. In 2001, Be Inc. was scooped up by Palm, and BeOS quietly disappeared.

An AI from Google DeepMind has achieved a silver medal score at this year’s International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), the first time any AI has made it to the podium.

The IMO is considered the world’s most prestigious competition for young mathematicians. Correctly answering its test questions requires mathematical ability that AI systems typically lack.

In January, Google DeepMind demonstrated AlphaGeometry, an AI system that could answer some IMO geometry questions as well as humans. However, this was not from a live competition, and it couldn’t answer questions from other mathematical disciplines, such as number theory, algebra and combinatorics, which is necessary to win an IMO medal.

Google DeepMind has now released a new AI, called AlphaProof, which can solve a wider range of mathematical problems, and an improved version of AlphaGeometry, which can solve more geometry questions.

When the team tested both systems together on this year’s IMO questions, they answered four out of six questions correctly, giving them a score of 28 out of a possible 42 points. This was enough to win a silver medal and just one point under this year’s gold medal threshold.

At the contest in Bath, UK, last week, 58 entrants won a gold medal and 123 won a silver medal.

“We are all very much aware that AI will eventually be better than humans at solving most mathematical problems, but the rate at which AI is improving is breathtaking,” says Gregor Dolinar, the IMO president. “Missing the gold medal at IMO 2024 by just one point a few days ago is truly impressive.”

At a press conference, Timothy Gowers at the University of Cambridge, who helped mark AlphaProof’s answers, said the AI’s performance was surprising and it appeared to find “magic keys” to answer problems in a similar way to humans. “I thought that these magic keys would probably be a little bit beyond what it could do, so it came as quite a surprise in one or two instances when the program had indeed found these keys,” said Gowers.

AlphaProof works similarly to Google DeepMind’s previous AIs that can beat the best humans at chess and Go. All of these AIs rely on a trial-and-error approach called reinforcement learning,  where the system finds its own way to solve a problem over many attempts. However, this method requires a large set of problems written in language that the AI can understand and verify, whereas most IMO-like problems are written in English.

To get around this, Thomas Hubert at DeepMind and his colleagues used Google’s Gemini AI, a language model like the one that powers ChatGPT, to translate these problems into a programming language called Lean so that the AI could learn how to solve them.

“At the beginning, it will be able to solve perhaps the simplest problems, and learn from solving those simpler problems to attack harder and harder problems,” Hubert said at the press conference. It also produces its answers in Lean, so they can be instantly verified as correct.

While AlphaProof’s performance is impressive, it works slowly, taking up to three days to find some solutions instead of the 4.5 hours per three questions that competitors are allowed. It also failed to answer both questions on combinatorics, which is the study of counting and arranging numbers. “We are still working to understand why this is, which will hopefully lead us to improve the system,” says Alex Davies at Google DeepMind.

It is also not clear how AlphaProof arrives at its answers or whether it uses the same kind of mathematical intuitions that humans do, said Gowers, but its ability to translate proofs from Lean into English makes it easy to check they are correct.

The result is impressive and a significant milestone, says Geordie Williamson at the University of Sydney, Australia. “There have been many previous attempts to do reinforcement learning on formal proofs and none have had much success.”

While a system like AlphaProof could be useful for working mathematicians in helping develop proofs, it obviously can’t help with identifying problems to solve and work on, which takes up a large portion of researchers’ time, says Yang-Hui He at the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences.

Hubert said his team hopes that AlphaProof will be able to help improve Google’s large language models, like Gemini, by reducing incorrect responses.

The trading company XTX Markets has offered a $5 million prize – called the AI Mathematical Olympiad – for an AI capable of achieving a gold medal at the IMO, but AlphaProof is not eligible because it is not publicly available. “We hope that DeepMind’s advances will inspire more teams to enter the AIMO Prize, and would of course welcome a public entry from DeepMind themselves,” says Alex Gerko at XTX Markets.