Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• The Big Read: Unity Software hopes for resurrection after a dramatic implosion

• The Top 5: Inside tech’s robot bonanza 

• Plus, our Recommendations: Spotlight and the snitches; an “ER” for our era; and Jensen Huang, thinking machine

Hi, 

It’s Abe Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section. 

Normally, I begin this newsletter with a column—usually about a person, company or trend that captured tech’s attention during the past week and underscores the industry’s mood and vibes. But lately I’ve been wondering whether I should spruce things up. Maybe it’s just the seasonal shift inspiring me—but still, I’d like to know: What do you think should start off this newsletter? 

Should it be my typical column? Or something that looks more like The Information AM—a digest of the biggest and most interesting stories from the past week? Maybe we move up our weekly pop culture recommendations and do more of those? What about a cartoon—a Saturday morning funny?

Perhaps something else entirely? Email me! I’m [email protected].

And thank you. Now, on to this week’s column… 

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it is often a poor strategy. And I expect Sam Altman may find my adapted adage true—perhaps several times over.

Apparently, the AI startup is working on creating its own social media network. Details are scant, but according to The Verge, OpenAI hopes to structure some of the platform around its beloved image-generating AI. Sure, I found the Ghibli images plenty amusing, but I still strongly suspect OpenAI will end up chasing the same white whale that has eluded so many others in tech in the last two decades: As we’ve seen time and again, it’s virtually impossible to build another large, enduring social network in addition to Facebook and Instagram.

Mark Zuckerberg, arguably the man who invented the concept of the social network, said as much in his testimony during the FTC’s antitrust case against Meta Platforms on Tuesday. “Building a new app is hard,” Zuckerberg said. “Many more times than not, when we have tried to build a new app, it hasn’t gotten a lot of traction.” (And the irony isn’t lost on me: Zuckerberg has spent the past several years trying to take a page from Altman’s playbook and turn Meta’s focus toward AI—with mixed results at best!) 

Other news suggests Altman is adopting another Zuckerbergian tactic: OpenAI is reportedly interested in buying Windsurf, which makes an AI coding tool. As Zuckerberg well knows, it’s sometimes faster and easier to buy a nascent competitor than it is to outcompete them. 

Given how AI’s economics are shifting, I think OpenAI could do more such deals. All the large language models are quickly becoming indistinguishable. It’s the applications built off those models that will prove most valuable, and as I’ve just explained—and as Zuckerberg said in court this week—those can be very hard to create in-house. 

So let’s assume OpenAI gravitates toward M&A as a way to grow as it matures. What’ll happen? Well, let’s say a lot of those transactions happen in a deal-friendly Trump administration. A less accommodating Democratic administration might easily retake the White House in 2028 if Donald Trump continues with his damaging economic policies. Meaning, I wouldn’t be surprised at all to someday have to write about OpenAI’s own antitrust trial.

Raiders Have Lost Their Rizz 

I’m just old enough to remember when corporate raiders hadn’t yet convinced the whole world to refer to them as “shareholder activists,” back in the twilight of raiding’s heyday. I’m thinking of Carl Icahn and Bill Ackman sparring over their opposing Herbalife positions on CNBC, which made for one of the more memorable moments of live television I’ve seen.

Boy, raiding has gotten real boring. These days, raiders—activists, whatever—are fighting over morsels, sparking snooze-inducing scraps with companies like Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Lyft. Sure, the Lyft thing is a touch more interesting, but the activist at play, Engine Capital, is hardly a latter-day Icahn. In the end, I bet Engine gets a board seat, Lyft’s stock goes up a little—and that’s about it.

A number of elements have contributed to raiding’s decline, including the easy defense mechanism that will prevent the Engine-Lyft relationship from ever getting very interesting: supervoting shares, which have become a standard for founder-led public companies in the last few decades. I think there’s another factor that isn’t as immediately obvious: The same people who would’ve once been attracted to the takeover games of the past have probably gone into cryptocurrency, where there’s even more room for financial magic, since the industry has far fewer rules. Unlike the bond market, crypto remains virtually unregulated. The leveraged buyouts of the 1980s are the meme coins of the 2020s: wagers on unsure premises backed mostly by some personality.—Abram Brown

The Big Read 

After a Dramatic Implosion, Can Unity Software Resurrect Itself?

In fall 2023, Unity Software committed one of the most boneheaded corporate blunders in recent memory. It overhauled the price of its game-development software, which at that point had a lock on the market and enormous brand loyalty. The change was dramatic: Many of its customers thought Unity’s move would bankrupt them. And almost overnight a company that had once attracted investors like Sequoia Capital and Silver Lake had committed an act of self-immolation. 

The consequences of that drama are still unfolding, as you’ll see in our latest Big Read, which comes from Simon Parkin, a returning Weekend contributor and veteran of publications including The New Yorker and The Economist’s 1843 magazine. Unity’s new CEO, Matthew Bromberg, is trying to restore customer confidence while reenergizing the company’s revenue growth—without angering customers all over again.

The Top Five

Tech’s Wildest Robot Dreams

It’s the stuff of Asimovian dreams: We’re in a full-blown boom in robotics funding, with startups raising $7.2 billion last year, a nearly 30% increase since 2020. It’s partly propelled by the parallel increase in AI—the technology that will supply the brains of these bots—and our Rocket Drew set out to find some of the strangest and most innovative robotics in this strange new world. 

Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, promises to always read before re-yeeting. Reach him at [email protected].

Listening: “Snitch City” (The Boston Globe)

Anyone annoyed about how journalists sometimes overrely on anonymous sources will find “Snitch City” absolutely enraging. Similar to how journos can hide behind such sources, police officers can stretch their relationships with confidential informants to dangerous extremes. This problem has particularly plagued the town at the center of this podcast from The Boston Globe’s Spotlight team: New Bedford, Mass., a place hit hard by gangs and opioids.

As you might expect from the same investigative unit whose Pulitzer Prize–winning coverage of the Catholic Church’s sex scandals became an Oscar-winning film, “Snitch City” contains excellent, dogged reporting, including a memorable on-the-record interview with a police officer who speaks out about a fellow officer’s alleged misuse of the informant system, as well as several heartbreaking conversations with a former snitch imperiled by a run-in with another seemingly dishonest cop.

But I wasn’t expecting “Snitch City” to tell its stories with such audio verve. Most pods from traditional print publishers struggle to make the most of the medium. Kudos to the Globe. With some sharp editing, the cliffhangers and rich cast of characters from “Snitch City” present a riveting drama. It’s the sort of thing that would make a pretty good film.—A.B.

Reading: “The Thinking Machine” by Stephen Witt

When the AI boom was just beginning a few years ago, a colleague really teased me when I committed a public misstep in front of the newsroom: I mispronounced “Nvidia” out loud (as “nuh-vid-ee-uh,” not “in-vid-ee-uh”). I’ll try to justify the mistake, there’d really been no reason to talk very much about the semiconductor company up until then. At that point, Nvidia was mostly just a quiet backbone of the videogame industry. 

I hadn’t thought about my misspeaking for a long time until I saw Stephen Witt include his own pronunciation guide to Nvidia in “The Thinking Machine,” a biography of Jensen Huang, the company’s megabillionaire CEO, president and co-founder. As Witt makes clear, Nvidia and Huang may still not be such household names as Elon Musk and Tesla or Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, but he and his company have rapidly become nearly as consequential. Nvidia today is the backbone of the AI industry, with chips more valuable than most precious stones. It’s a tremendously high perch for a person like Huang, a Taiwanese immigrant who has never publicly displayed the type of conquer-the-world tendencies many of his contemporaries have shown. 

Behind closed doors, though, Huang has displayed no shortage of aggressive assertiveness. When a Nvidia researcher initially pitched him on neural nets, the foundational technology behind the company’s enormous growth, he asked the researcher to do a thought experiment: Picture all 8,000 of Nvidia employees in the headquarters’ parking lot. “Then he told me I was free to select anyone from the parking lot for my team,” the researcher recalls.—A.B.

Watching: “The Pitt” (Max)

This suggestion probably should come with a medical warning—because I worry you’ll inhale the 15 episodes of “The Pitt” at a pace fast enough to jeopardize your health. The series debuted to a somewhat muted response right after Christmas but has since steadily attracted more and more attention, hurtling toward its season finale last week. Why weren’t people more instantly captivated? I think people were skeptical about whether the show, which takes place over a 15-hour period in a Pittsburgh emergency room, could really perform a rather tricky procedure: Pull off what’s essentially an “ER” reboot without suffering from the usual side effects of resuscitation in Hollywood. But it does. “The Pitt” is neither burdened with fan service nor dulled by prestige TV tropes—no antiheroes, no dragons. Much of what makes it so watchable is also what makes Netflix’s “Adolescence” work so well: a compelling narrative rooted very much in the problems and drama of the real world rather than a contrived one of warlocks or multiverses.—A.B.

Final Thought

And don’t even get us started about GPT-4.1 mini.