Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• The Big Read: Humanoid robots are the latest pawns in the U.S.-China tech war

• The Arena: Can 3D printing—yes, 3D printing—make Nike a winner again?

• The quiet AI mogul with $1 billion in sales—and no investors 

• Plus, our Recommendations: Putin’s favorite fintech; the dirt on d’oh!; and a collision between money and myth

Over several decades, one of Sam Altman’s finest skills has been his ability to tell—and sell—his own story and the stories of his many, many endeavors, including, most prominently, the one about OpenAI and its gambit to produce humanlike artificial intelligence. 

Perhaps Altman has done better work than he might’ve liked. His story has proven to be such an irresistible narrative, and he’s no longer the only person interested in telling it. A flood of books about him and about OpenAI have come out in the last few months, with the latest, “Empire of AI” by former Wall Street Journal reporter Karen Hao, cracking into The New York Times’ bestseller list.

To Hao, the attraction of doing an Altman book is somewhat easy to explain. “He’s polarizing,” she told me. It makes him a compelling main character and something like a human Rorschach test. “He has told so many stories, and he’s told so many variations of them: The proof of one story he told some people is the antithesis of another story he’s told. That’s ultimately why he’s polarizing and why you get so many different opinions about him.”

Obviously, the Altman books share some overlap, but I find it easy to differentiate them because they vary substantially in their skepticism of him. Parmy Olson’s “Supremacy” and Keach Hagey’s “The Optimist” view him pretty positively. “AI Valley” by Gary Rivlin, who has contributed to Weekend, falls in the neutralish middle. And while Hao’s “Empire of AI” looks at Altman quite askance, it doesn’t go as far as some texts that cast him nearly as a moustache-twirling villain, like “More Everything Forever” by Adam Becker.

Even as these books differ on whether Altman ultimately represents a tale of good or bad, they’re all underpinned by the same fundamental conclusion: Altman is questionably out to forever alter our world. At the same time, it’s intriguing that Hao’s “Empire of AI” is the only one to break into the Times’ bestseller list, a possible signal that people outside Silicon Valley share her pessimism—a group OpenAI needs to win over if it wants to expand. 

Zuckerberg Stocks Up

Mark Zuckerberg continues to try to bolster Meta Platforms’ AI ranks with high-profile hires, including Nat Friedman, the former GitHub CEO. Friedman’s a character: a guy who I’ve been told everyone wants to see at an industry party or microconference—if he’s there, it’s a marker of a real shindig—and the person who once led an international competition to decrypt an ancient document. After that contest, a slew of experts asked him to aid their quixotic endeavors locating shipwrecks and deciphering mysterious glyphs. He passed on all of them. Clearly, he was waiting for a really challenging opportunity to arise.

Bezos Gets Beat 

A decade or so ago, a pair of tech billionaires bought two of the most famous and well-regarded publications in America: Jeff Bezos purchased The Washington Post, while Laurene Powell Jobs bought The Atlantic. 

If I’d asked for bets then about which erstwhile media mogul would be most likely to see their new purchase flourish, I’d guess the heavy odds-on favorite would have been Bezos. 

Yeah, maybe not. The Atlantic has poached nine star journos away from The Post this year, according to New York magazine. To lure them away, Powell Jobs took the same approach Zuckerberg recently tried with OpenAI researchers: She offered them a ton of money. Well, a lot for media—salaries of $200,000 to $300,000. 

Meanwhile, The Atlantic apparently added 100,000 new subscribers in a week after Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg’s megascoop about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Signal chats. Having trouble imagining whether 100,000 subscribers is a big deal? Let me translate from media-speak into tech-ese: Think of them as 100,000 new users.—Abram Brown

Weekend’s Latest Stories

The Big Read 

Why Humanoid Robots Are the Latest Front in America’s Tech War With China

Apptronik CEO Jeff Cardenas has a stern warning. “Robotics is the key to the future, period,” he said. “I think that this is something that we have to really be mindful of and we have to play in. We need a strategy. We need to start thinking long term because these things take a long time.”

Quite a few robo-preneuers like Cardenas are coming up with ideas in America. At the same time, their Chinese peers are arguably much further ahead—and have the support of the Chinese government, which has identified humanoid robotics as the latest sector it will support. Yes, there’s a competition brewing even as its exact dimensions remain unclear, our Steve LeVine, Jing Yang and Juro Osawa report in this Week’s Big Read. They’re chasing a large prize: Morgan Stanley, for instance, estimates humanoids could account for $4.7 trillion in global revenue by 2050—up from a puny $300 million today. 

Meanwhile, Cardenas is hard at work on developing a humanoid robot called Apollo, and with a unique partnership with Google’s DeepMind, he has high hopes for why someone might someday want an Apollo, particularly in the field of eldercare, he says. Cardenas watched two grandparents grow old and infirm—and thinks a humanoid would’ve been a useful companion to both. “I dreamed that one day I would build a robot for them that would do all the things that they don’t want other people to do,” he said.

The Arena

Coming to Amazon: A 3D-Printed Nike Sports Bra?

For decades now, the low-cost promise of 3D printing has been an enticing lure for apparel manufacturers like Nike even as the technology has been difficult to commercialize. Nike is taking another shot at it, our Sara Germano reports in The Arena—Weekend’s new franchise focused on the business of sports. The company hopes the attention around a buzzy racing stunt will bolster consumer interest in 3D-printed items. 

Artificial Intelligence

The Little-Known Startup That Has Surged Past Scale AI—Without Investors

Recently, much has been said about Scale AI, the data-labeling startup Meta Platforms valued at nearly $30 billion in a deal announced last week. 

I’m not going to bother saying any more because there’s a competitor to Scale that’s much more impressive, one that hasn’t been talked about at all: Surge AI, the creation of 37-year-old Edwin Chen, our Stephanie Palazzolo and Cory Weinberg report. Last year, Surge did $1 billion in sales. Scale had less revenue—just $870 million. And while Scale isn’t profitable, Surge has been in the black since the start. 

Oh, and Chen hasn’t taken a drop of venture money. 

Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, thinks—gosh, a lot can happen in two weeks’ time. Reach him at [email protected].

Listening: “Hot Money: Agent of Chaos” (Financial Times, Pushkin Industries)

In 2020, a year of remarkable tumult, the collapse of Wirecard, a German fintech, didn’t register as much as it might have at a less chaotic moment—especially when you stop to consider that it’s really a spy story. Amid the rubble of the company, the startup’s chief operating officer, Jan Marsalek, disappeared. Turns out he was a Russian agent—and a person who has “preoccupied me for the past five years,” admits Sam Jones, a European correspondent for the Financial Times who hosts the latest season of “Hot Money,” a podcast co-produced by the FT and Malcolm Gladwell’s Pushkin Industries. Marsalek’s deception stretched worldwide—from Austria to the Côte d’Azur to Libya to Moscow—and he was an eager foot soldier in the “geopolitical power games, which in ways big and small govern our lives,” Jones says. “Games which have never felt more relevant.”  

Reading: “Stupid TV, Be More Funny” by Alan Siegel 

“There are many ways to generate easy internet traffic,” Alan Siegel, a culture writer at The Ringer, acknowledges in “Stupid TV, Be More Funny.” “One of the easiest is to cobble together a ‘Simpsons predicted’ listicle.’” Ain’t that the truth—one routinely reinforced by everyone from Collider to the Daily Mail to Esquire.

“Stupid TV, Be More Funny” doesn’t spend a great deal of time dwelling on how “The Simpsons” exists on the internet today. Instead, Siegel has assembled a definitive history of how the sitcom first achieved the type of tremendous popularity that has solidified it as a pop culture cornerstone 35 years later. Some of it seems quaint, a Butterfinger-smudged time capsule from a time when a Barry Diller–led Fox struggled to fill a week’s worth of TV programming—and people still consumed a television series as a weekly appointment at a set time. But much of the rise of “The Simpsons” is one of those media stories that resonates across the decades, a struggle among the show’s creative minds and their struggle with their corporate minders. If anything, it is a reminder that Diller has been as enduring a capitalistic fixture as the Springfield nuclear power plant.

Watching: “Death of a Unicorn”

Recently, I saw a goofy but charming parody of the social substratum that uses its vertiginous wealth to hide away in an alpine manse. No, not HBO’s “Mountainhead,” which, alas, is somehow still in the cultural conversation: “Death of a Unicorn,” an overlooked A24 horror-comedy.

I’m not spoiling “Death of a Unicorn” to say it involves, well, the death of a unicorn—an untimely act of roadkill by Elliot (Paul Rudd) as he and his daughter, Ridley (Jenna Ortega), speed up to an aerie owned by his creep-tastic billionaire boss, Odell (Richard E. Grant), who’s there with his own family, including his son, Shepard (Will Poulter), a nepo brat in short linen shorts and gold-tasseled loafers. Once they learn that consuming the unicorn can yield wonder-drug health benefits, they tuck in—much to Ridley’s dismay; shortly afterward, they start to scheme about commercializing their discovery. As it turns out, unicorns generally do not stay dead, and with a bit of a kick in the mouth, the film shifts away from skewering the rich to spoofing spooky house movies. Amid the mayhem, director Alex Scharfman makes a particularly fun reference to “Alien” that remains pressed into my memory.—Abram Brown

Final Thought

All right, who let Nathan Fielder out of the country?