Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• Meet Jacob Helberg, the MAGA star popular with tech liberals

• The best apps for exploring nature

• Plus: Ferrets, puffins and guinea pigs, oh my; Scottish scaries; and how to summer in Italy from your sofa.

Wanted! Investors for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to shove millions of dollars into a nascent technology during a time of great mania. Must be comfortable accepting the total absence of any business plan and willing to entrust capital to a person best known publicly for a leading role in one of the most dramatic corporate coups in Silicon Valley history.

That’s more or less the proposal put out by Ilya Sutskever, the OpenAI co-founder who announced his departure from the startup last month. Free as a bird, he’s starting what he calls Safe Superintelligence Inc. 

Sutskever envisions Safe Superintelligence as a pure-minded outfit that’ll focus on artificial intelligence research and developing AI systems as safely as possible. (At OpenAI, he clashed with CEO Sam Altman over whether they were taking the necessary precautions as they built tools like ChatGPT and Dall-E.) And to allow Safe Superintelligence to focus on safety, Sutskever says the company has no intention of prioritizing any commercial products.

Without revenue, Safe Superintelligence will need some serious outside capital to afford the rising costs around AI development. Who’s putting up the funds? Sutskever won’t talk about investors or how much Safe Superintelligence has raised. Nonetheless, his co-founder, Daniel Gross, insists investors are the least of their concerns. “Out of all the problems we face, raising capital is not going to be one of them,” Gross, a former Apple AI exec, told Bloomberg.

I don’t doubt that’s true. Worries about AI have risen to such a level that I can see Safe Superintelligence attracting plenty of backers. And then there’s the crowd who may dole out money to Sutskever and Gross just to screw with Altman. 

Look, if some rich people want to fund Safe Superintelligence with their personal wealth, sure, why not? It’s their money to lose. 

But I suspect we could also see venture capitalists wanting to invest their funds in the company. Then it becomes a matter of wagering their limited partners’ capital on a Hail Mary proposal from Sutskever and Gross.

If that happens, their limited partners, a group that includes public pension funds, should have some serious qualms about the situation. In theory, they’re expecting venture capitalists to invest in enterprises with at least some semblance of a strategy for generating revenue and profit, right? Sutskever and Gross, meanwhile, seem to have little interest in either. 

Yes, plenty of venture capital–backed startups change business models or have only the faintest idea for one. But Sutskever and Gross aren’t scrambling to develop a business plan on the fly. From the very start, they’re insisting the lack of a plan is the plan.

For that reason, I’d hope everyone financially contributing to Safe Superintelligence has enough common sense to see their funding as a philanthropic donation, not an investment for economic gain. I’m sure any form of superintelligence would agree with me.

Frankly, Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, likes to think of himself as a superintelligence. You can reach him at [email protected] or find him on X.

The Big Read

Trump’s Young Man in Silicon Valley

Jacob Helberg, Palantir adviser and husband of venture capitalist Keith Rabois, describes his relationship with former president Donald Trump as “a true love story.” 

“We just can’t stay away from each other,” he told our Margaux MacColl. 

Helberg and Trump certainly are tight, with Helberg assuming a key role as a MAGA link to Silicon Valley. (Trump keenly wants to win back America’s business elites, a group that has largely abandoned him.) At the same time, Helberg, a former Democrat, has managed to keep his appeal and ties to leftist techies, Margaux explains in this week’s Big Read. 

“He has a very simple, disarming style,” said venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, a prominent Silicon Valley Democrat who appeared at a recent conference hosted by Helberg that convened tech and political elites. “His style helps a lot in getting people together.”

The Top 5

Downloads for Backroads: Best Apps for Exploring Nature This Summer

Need to plan a hike in the Bavarian Alps? Want to win a debate about whether that’s Lyra or Leo? Figure out what that fungus is? Brigid Mander, a frequent Weekend contributor, has assembled a list of the best apps for venturing out into the great outdoors. Ohhh, darn it, now what fungus did I just step in…

Listening: The Times Goes to the Dogs

Let’s be honest: As much as “The Daily” from The New York Times has ascended to a position as shining North Star for podcasters, it can be dull and dreary and tends to dwell myopically on U.S. politics. But ahhh! A breath of fresh air has arrived in the form of “Animal,” a spinoff series from “The Daily” that appears on Sundays. 

“Animal” benefits from a charming host, Sam Anderson, a New York Times Magazine staff writer, and a simple conceit: Each week, Anderson delivers what you might call a spoken essay about a different fauna. So far, he has examined dogs, puffins, manatees and, most recently, ferrets. 

In each episode, Anderson displays a real magazine writer’s skill for first-person reportage and setting his stories in unique places. To talk about puffins, for instance, Anderson traveled to a tiny Icelandic village that’s home to a gigantic puffin colony; the village residents spend part of the year rescuing fledgling puffins from their collision with modern life. 

As for the ferrets, Anderson journeyed to the Ferret Buckeye Bash, a giant convention of ferret enthusiasts in Columbus, Ohio. The highlight: a competition akin to the Westminster Kennel Club’s annual dog show—except, of course, with ferrets.

Playing: Beasties From Below 

Anyone who has seen and enjoyed James Cameron’s “The Abyss” or John Carpenter’s “The Thing” will find themselves right at home aboard the Beira D oil rig in the North Sea. That rig makes for the exceptionally atmospheric setting for “Still Wakes the Deep,” a new horror videogame from The Chinese Room, a British studio named for a thought experiment that sought to discredit artificial intelligence. 

The Chinese Room’s games are big and brainy, and in the case of “Still Wakes the Deep” quite brawny, too, with aging Scottish electrician, Cameron McLeary, as the protagonist. He’s no demigod or advanced soldier, which makes “Still Wakes the Deep” a real challenge: There’s no magic machine gun to get you past the mutated monsters all around. 

Watching: A Gifted Grifter’s Return 

As much as I wish a trip to the dreamy Italian coast lay in store for me this summer, it very much does not. So I have taken solace in catching up with Netflix’s stellar “Ripley,” an adaptation of the Thomas Ripley novels created by author Patricia Highsmith.

It might seem challenging for a new Ripley-based series to thoroughly surpass the very well received 1999 film “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” which starred Jude Law and Matt Damon and collected several Oscar nominations. Rest assured, “Ripley” does,  having found an ideal actor, Andrew Scott (“Fleabag,” “All of Us Strangers”), to inhabit Highsmith’s murderous huckster—a pretty face hiding subtle cunning. 

Quite memorably, “The Talented Mr. Ripley” relied on a golden, sunny color palette. Netflix’s “Ripley” goes in a completely different direction, relying on exquisite black-and-white photography from Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Elswit (“There Will Be Blood”). Elswit’s framing creates a wealth of small but indelible moments, like an early scene at a bank in which Ripley eyes a stack of checks with the ravenous longing of a starving man arriving at a smorgasbord.

See “Ripley” now while you can still enjoy it without all the awards buzz. I expect it will receive a slew of Emmy nominations, which arrive in a couple weeks.

Final Thought

Go directly to jail. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Simple enough!