Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• The Arena: Call it moneyball for minors—inside the booming business of youth sports apps

• The Top 5: Best new places for a tech holiday party 

• Plus, our Recommendations: “The Big Short” with “Against the Rules: The Big Short Companion,” “Murderland,” and “John Candy: I Like Me”

Two months ago, Cleo Abram, a former Vox journalist turned YouTuber, posed an intriguing question to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. “What’s an example of a decision that you’ve had to make that’s best for the world but not best for winning?” she asked. 

Altman thought for a moment. “There’s a lot of stuff that could really juice growth or revenue or whatever but be misaligned” with a desire to keep ChatGPT free of crude gimmicks meant to “get you to use it all day,” he answered. What’s an example? she asked. “We haven’t put a sex bot avatar in ChatGPT yet,” Altman said. 

Well, the sex bots may arrive soon enough. On Tuesday, Altman announced that a new version of ChatGPT would “treat adults as adults” and allow content such as erotica. Of course, he isn’t the only one in AI to see the commercial opportunity in such content: Elon Musk has made a similar push on xAI, which already has a pair of popular sexually explicit chatbots.

Adding the X-rated stuff will surely increase scrutiny of ChatGPT and how OpenAI protects young people from abusing the technology, and Altman looked like he was already trying to fend off some of that disapproval by promising in the announcement that OpenAI would have successful age verification in place before making erotica  available. (To be sure, though, it’s long been difficult to perfect such technology.) 

Nevertheless, just this week’s announcement earned Altman plenty of criticism. But I doubt he sees porn as a long-term source of growth. Rather, I figure he sees it as a useful means to win an immediate boost in subscriptions and engagement. For right now, it’s convenient to allow it: It can help improve OpenAI’s figures at a time when it very much needs any kind of growth amid rising costs and (presumably) an eventual push for an IPO. Plus, it can draw users away from Musk’s xAI, infuriating Musk. Surely that alone would appeal to Altman in his bitter rivalry with Musk. 

Yet I suspect it’ll be convenient to shift course—again—in the future and ban the smut, probably when politicians have really turned up the heat on OpenAI. At that moment, Altman will get to score points for rectifying a mistake and expressing public contrition. And maybe he won’t be giving up much if OpenAI has successfully hooked users with other features: They won’t miss the Sora nudes (or whatever else comes) at all.

In the end, if Altman can quickly change his mind once on a growth gimmick, I fully expect he’ll change it again. 

What else I noticed this week…

Anthropic’s Jack Clark continued to sound the alarm about the possibility of destructive AI—and to cajole for greater regulation of the industry. His comments annoyed former podcaster/Trump AI czar David Sacks, who thinks Clark’s warnings are disingenuous and self-serving. Sure, Clark’s views align with Anthropic’s safety-first focus. But isn’t it a little unnerving that someone with so much access to the hidden workings of AI can’t stop talking about how the machines might get us? 

Josh Kushner scored himself a very flattering profile, which seems to be widely read by the only audience he ever cares to speak to: his fans and his friends.

What a time for Marc Benioff! Dreamforce came and went. His longtime friend Ron Conway, the investor and prominent Democratic donor, broke up with him—quitting a board seat at the Salesforce Foundation and criticizing Benioff’s loudly voiced support of President Donald Trump, including a suggestion that Trump send the National Guard to San Francisco. Then Benioff backtracked on his comments about the National Guard, saying he no longer thinks Trump should deploy the troops to San Francisco.

The engagement savants at “TBPN” have added wedding announcements to the show’s Twitter feed, which I suppose qualifies as Silicon Valley’s version of the New York Times’ Vows section. (Also, congrats, Brexton!)

A subway-building simulator game has gone a bit viral, with one fan describing its appeal thusly: “absolutely tickled my autistic itch.”

Oracle’s big investor-day presentation—following our reporting last week that cast some gloom on the company’s data center business—was something of a nothingburger. Or as my colleague Martin Peers wrote: “There were enough gaps in Oracle’s projections to make analysis difficult.”—Abram Brown

Weekend’s Latest Stories

The Arena

Moneyball for Minors: Inside the Booming Business of Youth Sports Apps

For a while, John Stewart, CEO of Fastbreak.ai, an app for scheduling and managing sporting events, tried to maintain a spreadsheet that listed all of his competitors. He’s since given up. “We stopped keeping track of it because we couldn’t even keep up with it,” Stewart said. 

The market for youth sports apps has exploded, forming a $12 billion market by one estimate. It remains a highly fragmented landscape, with a tremendous amount of opportunity for consolidation, our Sara Germano reports in The Arena, Weekend’s franchise devoted to the business of sports. Meanwhile, the digitization of youth sports has added headaches and stresses for parents and kids, complicating what should be a fun pastime. 

The Top Five

The Best New Places for a Holiday Party

These recently opened—or recently renovated—venues come highly recommended by the people who plan parties for the likes of Apple, Lyft and Space, a list assembled by our Jemima McEvoy. And if you think she’s a bit early in broaching this subject, you’re going to end up with a location that’s about as exciting as a lump of coal: The finest spaces will be booked up in a matter of weeks. 

Abram Brown is the editor of The Information's Weekend section. You can reach him at [email protected] or find him on X.

Listening: “The Big Short” with “Against the Rules: The Big Short Companion” 

If, like me, you’ve managed to forgive Michael Lewis for “Going Infinite,” his astonishingly shallow chronicle of the SBF fiasco, you’ll enjoy revisiting one of his finer achievements: “The Big Short.” It’s the book’s 15th anniversary, and Lewis is out with a new audiobook version narrated by himself—I find Lewis is best read by Lewis—plus a companion podcast produced by Malcolm Gladwell’s Pushkin Industries. For the pod, Lewis talks with many of the investors he profiled for the original book—along with Hollywood’s Adam McKay, who directed the Oscar-winning film adaptation. 

My only note of caution is that revisiting Lewis’ well-constructed explanation of money mania may make you shift a little uncomfortably in a chair the next time someone announces a mega-gigantic AI deal. Which, judging by the pace of things lately, probably happened 30 seconds ago.—Abram Brown

Reading: “Murderland” by Caroline Fraser 

Caroline Fraser, a former New Yorker writer, has a real ability to spin engaging new yarns about familiar figures. She won a 2017 Pulitzer Prize for “Prairie Fires,” a Laura Ingalls Wilder biography, and with “Murderland,” she shifts her attention from the prairie to the Pacific Northwest—a section of America that produced an astounding number of serial killers during the last half of the 20th century, including the I-5 Killer, Randall Woodfield; the Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway; and Ted Bundy, a fellow who needs no moniker. 

What Fraser assembles is no dry recounting of history, nor is it a sensationalist’s retelling of gristle and gore. Rather, she outlines a persuasive—and disturbing—hypothesis for why these monsters proliferated, one that received scant attention when a few other researchers highlighted it in the past. It’s called the lead-crime hypothesis, which suggests that high levels of arsenic and lead contributed mightily to mental and behavioral issues among people living near smelting factories and other facilities. And guess what area of the country had quite a few of these facilities: yep, the Pacific Northwest. 

“Recipes for making a serial killer may vary, including such ingredients as poverty, crude forceps delivery, poor diet, physical and sexual abuse, brain damage, and neglect,” Fraser writes. “Many horrors play a role in warping these tortured souls, but what happens if we add a light dusting from the periodic table on top of all that trauma? How about a little lead in your tea?”—A.B.

Watching: “John Candy: I Like Me” (Prime) 

“John Candy: I Like Me,” a new documentary about the comedian’s life and career, draws inspiration for its title from a moment in one of his best-remembered films, “Planes, Trains and Automobiles.” In the scene, Steve Martin’s character fires off a blistering series of criticisms about the boorish salesman portrayed by Candy, who is stung by the attack. 

“You’re right—I talk too much,” he acknowledges. “I also listen too much. I could be a cold-hearted cynic like you, but I don’t like to hurt people’s feelings. Well, you think what you want about me—I’m not changing.” And then he says: “I like me. My wife likes me. My customers like me. ’Cause I’m the real article. What you see is what you get.” 

As “John Candy: I Like Me” makes abundantly clear, many, many people liked Candy, and director Colin Hanks fills the documentary with conversations with Candy’s nearest and dearest (his childhood friends, his wife, his kids) and an impressive number of Hollywood luminaries, including Hanks’ own famous dad—that would be Tom Hanks—who starred alongside Candy twice. 

These recollections form a warm-hearted hug of a film depicting someone who genuinely cared about the people around him, inspiring their own devotion for him. A grim, glum celebrity retrospect it is not, but it doesn’t shy away from the fact that Candy wasn’t just what audiences saw: a jovial, Lou Costello–Jackie Gleason type. His great struggle in life was his weight, even as it became an inseparable part of his fame.—A.B.