Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• The Big Read: A dawn of another crypto revolution 

• Power and Influence: Trump’s antitrust cop is a ‘happy warrior’ 

• The Top 5: Our favorite new corporate merch and gifts. 

• Plus: Robots who rhapsodize; what Taylor Swift and Legos have in common; and Il Papa and the plotters.

What if the AI revolution we’re living through brings far greater positive changes to our lives beyond better-written emails? (Not that this email newsletter needs any such buffing up, mind you.) That’s entirely likely, and as such, it seems like we should perhaps pay attention to more than just “12 Days of OpenAI,” the startup’s holiday-themed term for a spate of product announcements.  

For instance, AI allows us to predict the weather like never before! A team from DeepMind, Google’s London-based AI lab, has developed a model that can offer immensely accurate 15-day weather forecasts, as the scientists describe in a paper published in Nature on Wednesday. 

The DeepMinders trained their tool, which they call GenCast, on 40 years of weather data made only recently available by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. The center makes the world’s leading weather-prediction model—well, it did. When the DeepMind researchers tested GenCast against the center’s software, GenCast outperformed it 97.2% of the time. 

“The implications of better weather forecasts are big and wide ranging,” Ilan Price told me. He’s the DeepMind scientist who led the research. “We can ask, ‘What’s the probability of a cyclone passing through a given location? When we can better predict the track of a cyclone earlier, it means we can more easily prepare: Evacuations get more warning; the more supplies can be stockpiled.” 

That’s a straightforward example. GenCast has even broader possible implications. 

“If we can predict how much wind power is going to be generated by a group of wind farms, which is another kind of experiment that we did in the paper, that increases the reliability of wind power and the rate of adoption,” Price said. “The more you can trust your wind power forecast, the less you have to rely on having fossil fuel reserves in the background to meet demand.”

(Sorry, San Franciscans: I did ask Price the question on your mind, and, no, GenCast can’t be used to monitor either earthquakes or tsunamis.)

Before developing GenCast, Price and his team had no deep expertise with meteorology. Rather, they were drawn to the enormous dataset they could get their hands and use to train their model. (And for free—no possible copyright legal woes involved!) It’s astounding to contemplate what else the AI boom might be able to use—and how much underutilized data is laying around waiting for someone to put it to a better purpose. I bet the right type of ambitious person might even glean a million-dollar idea or three from these treasure troves.—Abram Brown

The Big Read 

Another Crypto Revolution Is Here—and It Looks Nothing Like the Past

A dramatic wave of change is washing over crypto land. 

The industry elite now has Washington’s attention and adoration, with Donald Trump pledging to make crypto a part of his economic agenda. “The energy, the acceleration—that has just been just incredible. I’m feeling great about where this country is headed in terms of getting things right for crypto,” Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire told our Yueqi Yang. 

Yes, the Trump era seems like it’ll be good for all of crypto. And, more specifically, the immediate future is especially bright for the part of crypto that includes Allaire and Circle: stablecoins, cryptocurrencies that are pegged to the U.S. dollar and that hold dollar reserves. They’re really all cryptonians want to talk about these days—a real shift from a few years ago when much of the industry was insisting that the future lay in more far-out concepts like the metaverse.

Politics and Policy

Trump Picks a ‘Happy Warrior’ as His Antitrust Cop

Should tech tremble at the appearance of a new antitrust watchdog? Maybe not. Gail Slater, the newly announced Trump Administration pick to head antitrust efforts at the Justice Department, enjoys a reputation in D.C. and Silicon Valley for clear-headedness and little interest in dogmatism. “She’s not a fire-breathing person,” one person who knows her well told our Nick Wingfield.

The Top Five

The Best New Corporate Merch and Gifts 

Hoodies? Tired. Stanley mugs? Gulp. Tirredddd.

Todd Plummer, a frequent Weekend contributor, has far better suggestions for the next time you want to impress the staff or a conference full of people: hot sauces, olive oil, Theraguns—lobsters. “I used to sell about 10 orders of USBs a week,” one corporate merch specialist told Todd. “And now clients ask me for USBs maybe once a year.” 

Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, is anxiously awaiting to be named a czar of something—anything, really. C’mon! You can reach him at [email protected] or find him on X.

Attending: The Bots Take Broadway

In the last month, I’ve done my best to avoid the relentless marketing of “Wicked” and all the accompanying earworms with limited success. So imagine my relief when I finally found a new set of Broadway melodies to finally replace the endless loop of “Popular” in my mind.

In “Maybe Happy Ending,” an adaptation of a 2016 Korean production, a sudden malfunction disrupts the pre-programmed routines of two humanoid “Helperbots” in Seoul, one of which is played by Darren Criss of “Glee” fame. As a result, they begin to discover the full gamut of human emotions—and reckon with their own mortality. It was easily one of the best Broadway performances I’ve seen in years. When I found myself quietly crying in my seat, I felt embarrassed by how much those melancholy robots had affected me. Later, during one of the closing numbers, I heard sniffles and sobs coming from all around me. May all the robots we encounter in the future be so wonderfully life affirming.—Julia Black

Listening: Why Taylor Swift is at the Grocery Store 

For years, I’ve been quietly wondering what happened to the magazine racks at the grocery store checkout line. To be clear, I’m not talking about the collapse of print journalism and the shuttering of countless glossy weeklies—I’m well aware of that. What puzzled me was what had emerged in their place on the racks at Whole Foods and Publix stores around the nation over the last couple of years: ultrathick issues of seemingly unbranded magazines, each dedicated to a specific topic, like cats, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour and Legos.

In my quest to find the answer, I stumbled upon an episode from “Decoder Ring,” an (excellent) Slate podcast, that addresses my query and so much more. The episode’s title: “Can the ‘Bookazine’ Save Magazines?” I won’t spoil the answer, but I’ll say I was delighted by the depth and breadth given to the topic by Slate’s television critic, Willa Paskin, who leaves no stone unturned in an effort to solve this media mystery.—Paris Martineau

Watching: A Plot-Boiling Pope 

Could I interest you in a tale of election intrigue, dark corridors and deceptive motives? Such are the mechanics propelling the propulsive, pulpy “Conclave,” which stars Ralph Fiennes as a worn-down cardinal tasked with leading the selection of a new pope.

Since papal elections require a sequestration, the film, which is an adaptation of a 2016 Robert Harris novel by the same name, functions a bit like a locked-door thriller; it certainly contains plenty of backstabbing and (verbalized) knife play as Fiennes tries to manage the ambitions of his fellow Vaticanites (John Lithgow, Stanley Tucci). Red herrings abound, as do an abundance of magnificent red robes: The production design is top-notch, and those marbled corridors I mentioned seem startlingly true to life. 

Quite subtly, “Conclave” has a real sense of humor, too. When all the cardinals’ landline phones get taken away, the camera lingers on one holy father sitting outside in a courtyard, scrolling away on an iPhone.—A.B.

Final Thought

Well, when you put it that way.