Hi, welcome to your Weekend. 

This week, Annie brings us the story of a family-run startup arming young women with a new kind of safety device: The Birdie. Invented by two sisters whose children had been sexually assaulted, the emergency alarm attaches easily to bags or belt loops and screeches like a smoke detector when it’s activated. It is a simple piece of technology, but for Annie and other women she spoke to, it carries a lot of weight.

The device was already on my mind when we learned about the horrifying murder of CashApp founder Bob Lee in San Francisco this week. The crime brought home the reality that nobody is truly safe in a big city, and that young women aren’t alone in feeling vulnerable. Understandably outraged reactions to Lee’s killing streamed in all week, with some tech leaders renewing complaints on Twitter that San Francisco has become a lawless hellscape. (As of this writing, police have not identified a suspect or a motive in Lee's death.) 

In truth, the data doesn’t support many tweeters’ contention—violent crime rates in 2022 and 2023 are actually lower than in the years prior to the pandemic. But in this case, the data doesn’t square with everyday reality. I have lived in San Francisco off an on for the past 22 years, and I have never felt less safe walking or biking around downtown. The Civic Center area, in particular, is plagued by constant open-air drug-use, sidewalk fencing operations, and the mentally ill. My experience of this part of San Francisco has gotten worse, even if the citywide data tells me I’m mistaken. 

This dissonance is why people are treating Lee’s murder as a clear indictment of the city’s politics and leaders. It’s also why young women are purchasing devices like the Birdie by the millions—even as public-safety experts are unconvinced about their benefits. In such situations, the only data point that truly matters is your own sense of security. And lately, that has been severely compromised.

Now onto our stories...

the big read

Fear the Birdie: Can an Ear-Splitting Device Make Women Feel Safer?

It’s a Life Alert for the TikTok generation—or an AirTag crossed with an airhorn. Annie buys a Birdie, then meets the sisters who invented the $30 personal safety device that’s surpassed 2 million units in sales. As the safety-tech industry turns its focus on Gen Z, could pastel-colored panic buttons become a must-have accessory?

social studies

How Chess.com Became ‘the Wild West of the Streaming World’

While much of the e-sports industry struggles after billions in investments, Chess.com has gone in the opposite direction. By January, the site hosted over 10 million active players in a single day, more than World of Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto and Among Us combined. Jessica Lucas explains how chess blew up. 

market research

Roadie Revolution: The Stunning New Tech on Silicon Valley Bikes

In this week’s Market Research, Tim Stevens asks hardcore amateur riders to divulge the new tech—from sensors to smart glasses to blood glucose monitors—they’re using to soup up their wheels 

Reading: The chatbot who taught me
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing lately about the impacts of AI on education. But at least one school isn’t tripping. At Khan Lab School in Silicon Valley, students do schoolwork alongside “Khanmigo,” a tutoring bot developed in collaboration with OpenAI. The Washington Post’s Lisa Bonos talked to a few Khan Lab second graders who were using the bot for math help. One eight-year-old complained that the bot’s detailed descriptions for solving a problem could be “excessive.” But Salman Khan, the school’s founder and the creator of Khan Academy, believes AI chatbots can act like “a thoughtful tutor” to help students get ahead, rather than a crutch for atrophying young minds. We’ll soon find out if parents outside of tech-centric California agree—Khanmigo rolls out to schools around the country this month. —Arielle

Noticing: Love in the time of Zoom rooms
As the world sequestered itself behind Zoom squares in spring 2020, two Googlers still managed to fall in love. Emily Liu and Jacob Klinkler met on a contact-tracing project, and pretty soon, she was pinning his video feed to the top of her Zoom. A coworker spied Liu’s screen and decided to play matchmaker. A month ago, they wed in Colorado, and their story has since achieved virality via a small profile in the New York Times’ Vows section. As their pairing illustrates, it’s hard to predict love, and even harder to predict how we’ll use new technology to locate it. When Covid hit, dating apps rushed out a slew of remote-relationship features. But Liu and Klinkler found each other on a work Zoom, not Tinder. And it took a real-life Yenta, not an algorithm, to get their romance rolling. –Abe 

Listening: The Jiggaman, brought to you by AI  
The price of having Jay-Z rap on your hip-hop track just went way down. Music duo ​​AllttA, consisting of Colorado rapper Mr J. Medeiros and French performer 20syl, released a new track this week, “Savages,” complete with some bars from the legendary rapper. The catch? It was AI-generated: Medeiros wrote and recorded the lyrics, then used an AI model to turn his voice into Jay-Z’s. The result bears an uncanny resemblance to Jay-Z, and it even startled the artist’s go-to sound engineer, Young Guru. “People should not be able to take your Name, Image and Likeness without permission,” he wrote on Instagram. Worth noting: unlike most recent AI-music attempts, fake-Jay-Z’s rhymes are extremely catchy, and ​​Medeiros argues that hip hop has a long history of technological experimentation. “We think we have the right to try,” he said. —Margaux 

Makes You Think

Introducing Venture Capital Ken (LPs sold separately).

Until next Weekend, thanks for reading.

—Jon

Weekend Editor, The Information