Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• The Big Read: Will BlackSky be a space race standout—or another cautionary tale?

• The Top 5: Techies love at-home blood tests.

Plus: A digital mood board; mom versus Big Brother; and Terry Gilliam’s time arrives again.

We live in an age in which artificial intelligence has already altered our lives and continues to do so. Yet as this period goes on, I’m more and more convinced all of these changes will be pretty quotidian.

In other words, I’m really not expecting much AI fun to arrive. 

Those celebrity-voiced chatbots sounded fun—if, admittedly, somewhat like the reality imagined in films like “Her.” But building them seems rather difficult. Meta Platforms has canceled plans to make such chatbots, scuppering deals it made with stars like MrBeast and Snoop Dogg. 

Character.AI, meanwhile, had intentions to construct its own celeb bots. But it is effectively selling itself to Google and joining the corporation’s plans to build out its (personalityless) Gemini AI chatbot.

And for a minute, I thought maybe we’d get some revolutionary new piece of hardware—a gadget! Gadgets are cool. But hardware is, well, hard to do, and we’ve recently had several reminders of that. 

Humane, the startup that raised $230 million for an $700 AI-powered pin device, has been considering selling itself and raising debt financing after its product debut flopped a few months ago. (It hopes to salvage what remains of its dreams by adding Cisco legend John Chambers to its board.) Another erstwhile AI hardware maker, Rabbit, suffered its own debut flop a couple weeks after Humane’s pin came out. 

A third startup, Friend, tried to grab the spotlight this week, talking up a recent Series A for its pendant-shaped device: $2.5 million at a $50 million valuation. Not bad!

I wonder if some of Friend’s investors might’ve expected the money to go to hardware development. Instead, Friend blew nearly all the funds—$1.8 million!—to acquire a URL, Friend.com. What meaningful progress can it make on hardware with the leftovers? $700,000 gets you two (maybe three) good engineers. 

As I consider this startup wreckage, I’m left to reflect on how exactly AI crept into my life in the last few days. At a dinner with a friend, she talked about using Microsoft’s Copilot—for tasks related to her job at one of the big streamers. Dull. I queried ChatGPT several times this week, mostly asking it to tweak a few recipes I wanted to make. It’s hardly scintillating stuff, but the function has made the chatbot a frequent presence in my life. Still, a Gordon Ramsey bot that screams bloody murder as I botch beef Wellington for the umpteenth time does sound pretty enjoyable. 

Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, is also canceling all of his public events this weekend, but mostly because it has been *a week.* You can reach him at [email protected] or find him on X.

The Big Read 

Will BlackSky Be a Space Race Standout—or Another Cautionary Tale?

“What we’ve recognized from day one is that there’s tremendous opportunity if you can bridge the gap between all the crazy, advanced, cool stuff that’s going on in space and all the amazing stuff that’s going on in software and artificial intelligence,” said Patrick O’Neil, chief technology officer of BlackSky. “Because historically, those two have been completely different worlds.”

Sounds neat! But can you turn that into an honest-to-goodness business? I find that question hanging in my mind as I hear about many of the companies participating in the great commercial space race that’s unfolding around us. In our latest Big Read, Weekend newcomer Sarah Scoles, a Wired magazine veteran, explains how O’Neil and BlackSky CEO Brian O’Toole—the O-boys, as she likes to think of them—plan to expand their satellite-and-software company while assuaging panicky investors. 

The Top 5

Silicon Valley Is Out for Blood

The technorati—as both customers and investors—are fueling a gigantic boom in at-home blood and DNA tests. By one estimate, the market for these kits could more than quadruple in the next decade to over $8.8 billion as investors like Andreessen Horowitz put money into startups such as Austin-based Function Health, which recently won a partnership with Equinox, a high-end gym chain. The tests are all about health and longevity optimization, not ancestry research—the focus of the original companies in the industry, such as 23andMe. 

Ashley Mateo, a former Shape magazine editor, compiled this list of the best at-home kits after speaking with techies like Derrick Johnson, 40, co-founder of Encounter AI. “It was about putting the power back in my hands,” he told Ashley. “I think there’s a whole generation of people who no longer want their first interaction with this kind of testing to be when they might have cancer or heart disease or diabetes.”

The Way-Back Machine 

‘Sometimes, It Feels Real’: Character.AI Gives Humans the Chatbots They Desire (2023)

What precisely did Google just spend $2.5 billion on? Almost exactly one year ago, a Weekend Big Read from our Jon Victor explained the premise and promise behind Character.AI. “A lot of users are using this for something deeply personal,” co-founder Noam Shazeer told Jon. “And they’re using it for emotional support, so you really would not want something that kind of confuses the two.”

Downloading: A Mood Board of Digital Keepsakes 

I have a soft spot for art projects that straddle the line between meaningless and delightful. Maybe that’s why a browser extension from multidisciplinary designer Anatoly Zenkov has stolen my heart. 

It’s called Button Stealer, and as you might have guessed, it serves a very specific (and silly!) purpose: stealing buttons, the widgets and digital calls to action that pepper every modern website.

Since I installed it last week, I have slowly but surely amassed a stash of online buttons, all cribbed at random from webpages I’ve visited: a See New Posts button from X, a snazzy Subscribe button from a film culture blog, and my personal favorite, a striking all-caps WRAP button from my midweek Chopt purchase. (I confess that I got a salad, not a wrap.) 

Of course, these buttons serve no actual purpose. But looking at them brings me the same joy other people get from leafing through their passport’s stamped pages. They’re small, sometimes inscrutable markers of my digital travels, reminders of where I might enjoy going again.—Paris Martineau

Reading: Mom Versus Big Brother

May is burned out. Her kids are addicted to devices strapped to their wrists called Bunnies. She recently lost her job as a writer to the very AI systems she helped train. Her husband strings together a series of increasingly humiliating and underpaid gig economy jobs. Everywhere she goes, she is followed by hyperpersonalized ads trying to get her to upgrade to premium experiences.

May is the fictional protagonist of Helen Phillips’s new novel “Hum,” (Marysue Rucci Books) which imagines an uncanny world in which all our existing technologies are taken just a tick further into dystopian extremes.

Strapped for cash, May agrees to undergo a paid experimental surgery designed to make her unrecognizable to the city’s omnipresent facial recognition system. But when she loses track of her children one day and the system fails to identify her as their mother, May faces the harsh reality of what it means to opt out from a world dominated by digital surveillance. The book is a poignant exploration of the anxieties of parenthood and hopefully not a preview of what’s to come.—Julia Black

Watching: Terry Gilliam’s Time Comes Again

Surely 11-year-old Kevin, the pint-size hero of Apple+’s “Time Bandits,” must feel like a fellow born in the wrong time. He has very little interest in the technological creature comforts of the 21st century that delight his neglectful parents, a pair who find enormous humor in texting each other dumb jokes while seated together on the sofa. (“Tech is the future,” his father tells him. “Use your phone—you could be chatting to someone else while we’re talking!”)

What Kevin (newcomer Kal-El Tuck) yearns for is the past—and for an adventure to take him away from his existence in boring lower-middle-class Britain. Fortunately for him, both rush into his bedroom one evening in the shape of a group of hapless thieves trundling through time via his closet. The troop, led loosely by the insecure Penelope (Lisa Kudrow from “Friends”), has a map of the universe and uses time portals to treasure hunt; one such portal exists in Kevin’s home. The marauders have pilfered the map from an omnipotent floating head, the Supreme Being (Taika Waiti), who would like it back.

Final Thought

Tired: brat summer. Wired: GAAP summer.