Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• The Big Read: The Thiel protégé set to dispense a dose of abrupt change to the U.S. Health Department

• The Top 5: The best high-tech protective gear for skiers and snowboarders

• Plus, our Recommendations: A tricky traitor in the Troubles; a deeply researched television set; and Michael Fassbender goes James Bond–ish

Oh, bonjour, Monsieur le Vice-Président! 

Next week, JD Vance will bid adieu to the States and jet over to Paris for a major affair: the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit, which French President Emmanuel Macron will host at the Grand Palais. Britain put on a version of this event in 2023, and Seoul took a turn last year, convening world politicians and the AI industry elite to discuss the technology’s future. 

Vance’s visit to France marks his first international trip since he took office, and it doesn’t feel accidental that it involves AI. The technology has become an early focus point for the Trump administration—the Stargate announcement came a day after inauguration—and Vance’s appearance at the summit further underlines the White House’s interest. 

Much has changed since the summit last occurred in Europe, and Vance will find a European AI scene that has substantially changed over that time. Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Antoine Moyroud drew my attention to one major change by comparing the name of this year’s conference, the AI Action Summit, to what Britain called the debut event, the AI Safety Summit. 

It’s a subtle but significant change, Moyroud said, illustrating a growing anti-regulation sentiment in Europe, which has generally been pretty pro-regulation. Vance should like the sound of that. “It’s a reflection of a desire to say that safety is important, but it shouldn’t come at the cost of becoming a laggard in technological innovation,” Moyroud said. 

A substantial portion of the summit will be devoted to conversations about how to best use AI technology in everyday life, Moyroud and several other people planning to attend the event told me. Again, that’s a major change from the tenor of the conversations at the debut affair in Britain, where discussions mostly focused on existential fears that AI could end everyday life. 

Of course, Macron and the French government hope rolling out the rouge carpet will encourage further investment in the country’s AI startups. The largest is Mistral AI, which has hoovered up $650 million in funding from many big American names, including Microsoft, Nvidia and Salesforce. Thanks to those deep-pocketed investors, Mistral has the capital to develop its own large language models. But many more AI startups in France and other parts of Europe are more focused on building applications off the LLMs made widely available by companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta Platforms. These European companies haven’t had the funding to design their own models, and now DeepSeek’s arrival suggests LLMs could become a thankless commodity business anyway. 

“I believe that the big winners are going to nail the product layer,” said Stanislas Polu, co-founder of Dust, a Paris-based AI startup. “And it’s unclear who’s going to nail it. It might be Google—might be Microsoft. Might be ServiceNow. It might be us. It may be anybody.”

Dust, which has raised more than $20 million from Sequoia Capital and others, makes what are called AI agents—bots that can perform basic functions like calendar scheduling and completing forms—and it specializes in ones made for office tasks. They’re one of the newer things in AI, but Polu has found they’ve proven to be quick hits within the workforces of Dust’s early customers. “We see almost a Slack level of use,” said Polu, who spent three years as an OpenAI researcher before starting Dust.

I asked Polu what he thinks has changed significantly among European AI startups from the time of the first summit in Britain to the one this year at the Grand Palais, and he pointed to a shift in how Dust and many others define their primary market: the U.S. If they focus on winning their respective domestic markets—none of which really compares in size to America—they might as well just walk themselves up to the guillotine and be done with it. 

“We’re in a group of startups that consider Europe a distraction. We target the U.S. market because we know that’s where the battle is going to happen,” Polu said. “We have global ambitions from the get-go.”—Abram Brown

The Big Read 

As DOGE Shakeup Looms, a Thiel Protégé Looks to Disrupt U.S. Health Department

The Silicon Valley takeover of Washington has reached a frenzied level, and our Julia Black’s Big Read shows where it may go next: the Department of Health and Human Services, which lags only the Defense Department with the second-largest budget in Washington: $2.4 trillion. 

That money gets spread out across some parts of the government that play major, major roles in our lives, like the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Those agencies will soon get a pair of new leaders: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is set to become health secretary, and Jim O’Neill, a Peter Thiel protégé and Bush administration veteran who’s on track to become Kennedy’s No. 2. 

While O’Neill’s knowledge of how things work in Washington could end up making him the more influential of the pair, both he and Kennedy share common cause with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency crew: a desire to dramatically rethink how the U.S. government works, with reduced budgets and less regulation. Their overlapping mindsets could lead them to open the door to DOGE—especially since HHS’s gigantic budget would make an appealing cost-cutting target.

The Top Five

The Best High-Tech Protective Gear for Skiers and Snowboarders

I’m not a skier. I’ve tried it several times, and on each occasion I spent an uncomfortable day going thump-thump-thump down a hill—which always made me want to encase myself in bubble wrap before getting back on the lift. Maybe my outlook would be different if I had any of the gear compiled in this guide by Brigid Mander, a frequent Weekend contributor and an avid skier who considers double black diamonds mere child’s play. She’s found the best of the traditional stuff—helmets, goggles—and she spotlights the newest protective items, like knee pads and a back protector.

Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, regretfully hoarded many more avocados than he needed to. Reach him at [email protected] or find him on X.

Buying: Big Screen, Big Discount

A couple of weeks ago, I decided I needed a new television. This should have been a relatively straightforward endeavor! Almost anything would have been a massive upgrade from my existing TV, a dinky 50-inch set acquired from an ex-roommate. Yet for reasons I still don’t fully understand, I felt compelled to dive into the rabbit hole of consumer electronics ratings and devote an embarrassing number of hours to researching the “best” possible TV to purchase. Allow me to share the fruits of my labor.

I read guides from both Wirecutter and Consumer Reports. I browsed so many subreddits. I also consulted Rtings and famous gadget guy Leo Laporte, who’s a friend of mine: By far, he and Rtings proved to be the most helpful. Leo advised that I should prioritize getting a TV with a QD-OLED panel—the QD stands for quantum dots, and they’re quite important, according to Leo. He also implored me to measure the distance between my couch and media console and buy a TV that fits appropriately into my space: in my case, 65 inches. The data-driven review website Rtings helped me understand the best times of year to buy a TV and easily compare the specs of my options. 

One of those times is now, in the period leading up to the Super Bowl, so I decided to take advantage of a steep discount on a 65-inch Samsung S90D (QD-OLED). Its picture is beautiful to behold, and the set pairs nicely with my Panasonic Blu-Ray player.—Paris Martineau

Listening: A Back-Stabbing Rat Catcher 

In the midst of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Irish Republican Army considered anyone who ratted on them to the British authorities the worst kind of traitor—their actions punishable by death. The Brits had a propagandist’s term for such informers: “converted terrorists.”

Meanwhile, there was a British mole inside the IRA—code-named Stakeknife—whose identity has remained a subject of roiling debate long after the Troubles ended. The simply named BBC podcast “Stakeknife” reexamines the mystery: Was Stakeknife actually Freddie Scappaticci, one of the IRA’s snitch-hunter generals? What an irony that would be! As one of Scappaticci’s contemporaries tells the BBC: “[John] le Carré couldn’t have fucking made this up.”—A.B. 

Watching: Double-Oh Uh-Oh

As I was mentioning earlier, many fine things come from France: perfume, cheese, croissants—and the basic concept behind “The Agency,” a Michael Fassbender spy thriller based on the earlier French series “Le Bureau des Légendes.” Fassbender is a CIA agent abruptly recalled to London after spending years deep undercover in Sudan. Once back in Britain, he faces a number of personal and professional crises. Another secret operative goes missing. His daughter wants nothing to do with him. Meanwhile, someone has bugged his apartment; his bosses (Richard Gere, Jeffrey Wright and Dominic West) swear it wasn’t them secretly keeping an eye on him. Then the true love he left behind in Sudan turns up unexpectedly. For Season 2, I picture an invasion of DOGE forces adding to his worries.—A.B. 

More Watching: A Different Kind of Toxic Relationship

There’s a genre of films I normally can’t stand: A tortured male genius is so consumed by his work that he hardly notices the passive, two-dimensional—but very, very beautiful—woman yearning for his attention (see: “Whiplash,” “Mother!” and “The Theory of Everything”). But there is one film in this genre that I absolutely love: “The Phantom Thread,” which flips the trope on its head.

The Paul Thomas Anderson masterpiece is about Reynolds Woodcock, a brilliant womenswear designer in London who meets Alma, an immigrant waitress at a country inn. (Vicky Krieps, in her first major role, somehow manages to steal the show from the GOAT, Daniel Day Lewis.) After their unusual first encounter, Woodcock is irresistibly drawn to Alma’s vibrant audacity, and she soon becomes his lover and muse. But when she moves in with him and attempts to carve out a place in his perfectly regimented life, he comes to resent the very liveliness he first fell in love with.

While the female characters in most of these films shrink themselves to accommodate the narcissistic men in their lives, Alma refuses to be suppressed. In the final act, Alma flips the power dynamic in a fairly shocking manner. But what’s really surprising is how romantic her act of subterfuge actually feels.—Julia Black

Final Thought

War is hell—especially when all the conference rooms are booked.