Hi, welcome to your Weekend.

I’m a sucker for year-end lists, reflections and resolutions, despite the fact that so many of them suffer from predictability. One of the highlights of my week was sitting around my dining room table with extended family discussing what everybody liked and didn’t like about 2023.

It was also fascinating to hear tech leaders sound off on those and related topics in our cover story this week. We asked 15 of them to respond to a 2023 exit survey about their favorite books, movies and wellness routines, along with their high and low points of the year. “Oppenheimer” and concerns about a rise in antisemitism were two recurring themes in their answers. 

Another was the importance of being present in our lives. When we asked Trae Stephens, a Founders Fund partner, to share his favorite photo he took this year, he cheated a bit and said that this year he tried to “experience life without constantly holding a phone in front of my face.” To illustrate his point, he linked to photos of two climactic moments in NBA games: one of Michael Jordan scoring in 1998 with thousands of fans staring at him in disbelief from the stands, the other of Lebron James scoring in a game this year with thousands of fans staring at the screens of their smartphones while they record him.

Wise words, prompting a personal New Year’s resolution for me: Don’t be that guy in 2024. If you’re at a concert or sports event, watch the performance. Don’t watch it through that little wedge of glass and electronics you keep in your pocket. Maybe tech can solve this problem once we start putting wearables on our faces and lapels. I have a suspicion it will create a lot of new ones though. 

Have a Happy New Year, everybody. See you all in 2024!

Now onto this Weekend’s stories...

THE BIG READ

The Information’s 2023 Exit Survey of Tech Leaders

We asked venture capitalists, startup founders and executives from big tech companies to put a bow on 2023 by sharing their highs and lows, self-care routines and best splurges for the year.

BY THE NUMBERS

Tech Wrapped: The Stats that Defined Silicon Valley’s 2023

Measuring the ‘main character energy’ of tech CEOs, the unicorn slump and other figures—both serious and silly—that tell the story of a strange and turbulent year for tech.

THE YEAR IN ENTERTAINMENT

The Information's 2023 Culture Picks

Close out 2023 with a recap of the movies, streaming series, books and podcasts our team obsessed over this year.

Generating: Build-A-ChatGPT

It’s a journalist’s worst nightmare: Wired reporter Reece Rogers used OpenAI’s $20 monthly ChatGPT Plus feature to develop a GPT trained on his reporting. After he fed the chatbot 50 of his articles, the GPT was able to mimic his writing (if you’re a ChatGPT Plus subscriber, you can try it yourself). Although this article definitely convinced me that AI will one day take my job, it also showcased one of my favorite uses for ChatGPT so far. I’ve had a blast feeding the AI my own personal writing, and then asking it to write additional paragraphs in my voice. Without personalization, ChatGPT’s default is to lean on cliches and lazy metaphors. But, as Rogers wrote, once you feed it your own writing, it becomes a pretty magical tool—a way to be in conversation with yourself. Assuming you’re okay with handing over even more data to OpenAI, give it a try. Your AI twin might surprise you. —Margaux

Listening: A closer look at ketamine

Ketamine has sparked both excitement as a potential wonder drug for treating mental illness and controversy over its safety (the recent death of actor Matthew Perry from a ketamine overdose has only added to the scrutiny). Journalist Derek Thompson explored another fascinating dimension of the drug on his Plain English podcast when he interviewed Boris Heifets, a Stanford University assistant professor of anesthesiology and author of a ketamine study published earlier this year. To tackle the mystery of how ketamine works, Heifets and his co-authors came up with a clever way of preventing patients in their study from experiencing the psychedelic trip that some researchers think might be why people with depression see improvements in their mental health after taking it. All of the patients in the study were given ketamine or a placebo while under general anesthesia for surgical procedures. The good news: All of them experienced significant drops in depression. The puzzling news: Those improvements were the same whether the patients received ketamine or the placebo. However ketamine works its magic, it doesn’t seem to be the trip that does it. —Nick

Noticing: A year of fraud, grifting and self-destruction

For the 15 people who made Forbes’ list of The Most Notable Career Crashes of 2023, this was the year that consequences came calling. The annual hall of shame includes alleged abusers like former Michigan State University head football coach Mel Tucker and former National Association of Realtors president Kenny Parcell; disgraced politicians like George Santos and Bob Menendez; and a handful of people, from former CNN Chairman and CEO Chris Licht to the former board of OpenAI, who were just colossally bad at their jobs. While it’s easy to point the finger of blame at each of these individuals, there’s clearly a pattern here worth noting. At a certain point, we have to ask ourselves: Why do we keep elevating people who are so brazenly untrustworthy to begin with? —Julia

Makes You Think

If the glass ain't broke...

Until next Weekend, thanks for reading.

—Nick