Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• A secretive weapons billionaire and his never-ending transformation

• Where art insiders and Silicon Valley collectors make their hidden-gem purchases

• A power lunch to end all power lunches

• Plus: Apple’s latest chase; Spider-Man takes on Big Brother; and a billionaire investor’s favorite book.

A week ago, Demis Hassabis, the mastermind behind Google’s artificial intelligence ambitions, was explaining how life works to me.  

“Proteins—proteins are essential to all life,” he said, seated in his London home office. “Every function in the body depends on proteins. And understanding that structure is important because if you understand it, it can help inform disease understanding, basic biology and drug discovery—a huge breakthrough.”

Just so, Demis. Which is why his AI research into protein structures has landed him one of this year’s Breakthrough Prizes, a set of awards handed out annually since 2012 that were co-founded by some of tech’s richest and most influential people: Yuri Milner, Mark and Priscilla Chan Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki. They honor "great scientists who are driving humanity forward," Milner said. "Our modern world was made possible by scientific discovery, and our future depends on it."

Each award comes with $3 million, and the recipients will formally receive the prizes tonight in a star-studded, Oscars-style ceremony in Los Angeles, which includes presenters such as Robert Downey Jr., Kim Kardashian and Jessica Chastain. The big to-do in LA is meant to treat the scientists to a celebration as grand as their accomplishments and to redistribute some wealth to people who can put it to good use. 

Hassabis undertook his research as he ran DeepMind, an AI research lab that Google purchased in 2014. While there, he and fellow scientist John Jumper developed AlphaFold, AI technology that can predict a protein’s 3-D structure through its amino acid sequence, which allows scientists to pursue new drugs more cheaply, among many other benefits. (He also created AlphaGo, an AI that beat the human world champion in Go, a complex board game.) And what will he do with the $3 million prize? He’s donating to several organizations that help young people from impoverished backgrounds succeed at completing a university education, a hurdle Hassabis himself had to overcome at Cambridge University.    

Another Breakthrough Prize recipient is Carl June, a University of Pennsylvania professor and physician who created a novel leukemia treatment with CAR T-cell therapy that has proven greatly effective against the disease since the 2010s. It’s now being tested in fighting other cancers, including brain tumors—“which are still pretty much a death sentence,” said June, 71. “The mortality rate hasn’t changed since I was in med school.” 

His prize money will go to extending efforts to bring CAR T-cell therapy overseas—to places like Africa and South America, where it remains nonexistent. Seeing the therapy’s impact in America has reinforced his enthusiasm for his continued work in those countries. “Look, it’s been a long journey,” June said. “But now to actually see patients who’ve benefited—that’s the best privilege I could have.” 

Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, suspects his proteins will feel thoroughly folded after an apartment move on Saturday to downtown Brooklyn. As he untangles them and unpacks, you can reach him at [email protected] or find him on X.

The Big Read

Secretive Weapons Billionaire Thomas Tull’s Never-Ending Transformation

The last time I paid any significant attention to Thomas Tull was in early 2016, when he was busy selling his film production company, Legendary Entertainment, to China’s richest person for an eye-watering amount. He’d spent the previous holiday season jetting back and forth to China to seal the deal. He was even taking Mandarin lessons as he envisioned working with Legendary’s new owner on a further expansion into China. 

Let’s hit the fast-forward button to today: our Julia Black’s new tale of Tull shows how much has changed for him since then. Once a Hollywood mogul and leading Democratic donor, Tull has shifted to investing in weapons and defense tech startups and has emerged as one of the Republican party’s most important new donors. Tull still sees China as a business opportunity but for a very different reason: Like many of his connections in Washington, he views the country as a rising global threat and hopes the startups in his portfolio can counter its ambitions—and win government dollars to do so. Lately, he has further tightened his ties with politicians through events like an annual retreat at his rural Idaho lodge that mixes Silicon Valley and Washington heavyweights. 

The stakes involved in defense tech investing are high, as Jeffrey Ding, a George Washington University political science professor who writes a weekly newsletter about China and AI, noted to Julia: “You don’t want policymaking in these areas to be captured by private industry,” he said.

The Top 5

Move Over, Miami: Where Silicon Valley Collectors and Art Insiders Really Buy Their Masterpieces

Non-fungible tokens sure are dead, but Silicon Valley is still getting richer, with a growing number of young moguls eager to spend some of their millions in the art world. Many flock to Art Basel Miami, which really isn’t the best place to pick up the next masterpiece to hang above the mantel, explains Weekend newcomer Todd Plummer, a veteran of The Wall Street Journal, Condé Nast Traveler and Travel + Leisure.

Todd spoke to collectors including billionaire venture capitalist Jim Breyer, dealers and other art world experts to put together this list of where season insiders and knowledgeable new collectors alike go shopping.

Power Lunch

From Gayle King to Wendi Murdoch to Karlie Kloss, Female Leaders Gather to Discuss AI, Politics

A few days ago, our Jessica Lessin joined Google Chief Marketing Officer Lorraine Twohill and Joanna Coles, former Hearst Magazines chief content officer and former Cosmopolitan editor in chief, to host their annual Power 100 lunch, a women-only conclave where the world’s most important executives and creatives connect and discuss the most important topics of the day, which this year included AI. Guests included supermodel Karlie Kloss, The New York Times Co. CEO Meredith Kopit Levien, CBS Mornings co-host Gayle King, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey and Wendi Murdoch, among many others. 

Listening: Big Brother’s Big Upgrade

Like many, I first read “1984” as a school assignment, which I vaguely remember as weird and difficult—pretty much the reaction of my teen as she toils through George Orwell’s dystopian classic. So I’ve been delighted to actually enjoy the novel, without the strictures of term papers and class discussions, through the recently released Audible radio play. 

The production stars several well-known actors, including Andrew Garfield (“The Social Network,” “The Amazing Spider-Man”), Cynthia Erivo (“Wicked”) and Tom Hardy (“Mad Max: Fury Road”). Garfield plays a hapless everyman endlessly trying to mask his heretical thoughts with carefully neutral comments and facial expressions. It’s easier to listen to than a typical narration, since the instrumentation and atmospheric sounds, like a train conductor shouting, deliver a cinematic experience to your ear. 

But in the end, it’s the details of a society gone mad that makes the novel worth reliving. Take the way one of the protagonist’s dining companions gleefully describes rewriting the English dictionary into Newspeak by boiling the language down to derivatives of a few concepts like good. “It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words,” exclaims his companion. “That’s the whole aim of Newspeak, Smith, to narrow the range of thought, narrower and narrower.” Double plus ungood indeed.—Laura Mandaro

Reading: From Trains to Artificial Brains 

Let me shelve my suggestions for a week and give you one from Philippe Laffont, the billionaire founder of Coatue Management. In a wide-ranging conversation with our Jessica this week at The Information’s debut Private Capital Conference, Laffont, while talking about AI, mentioned his “favorite book of all time”: “Engines That Move Markets,” a 570-page chronicle of market- and world-altering technologies. 

It’s by no one especially famous. Author Alasdair Nairn wrote it around the dot-com era in the spare moments from his day job as the Scottish Widows Investment Partnership’s chief investment officer. Nairn’s time spent examining the markets stood him in good stead, though, and he obviously knows his stuff. The book “goes through every great tech invention since, I think, 1850,” Laffont said. “And by and large, with every invention—whether it’s the steam engine or whale oil or railroads—it’s always the same at the beginning: enormous excitement.” And that’s just where we are with AI—at the enormously excited start of things, Laffont said.

Of course, like any good storyteller, Nairn traces the narratives to their end: “At some point, there’s a rationalization—all the weak players die, then a few companies become really big.” So perhaps we should see “Engines That Move Markets” not as a collection of history lessons from previous ages but as a gauge for measuring who might survive our modern AI age.

Laffont’s other reading habits? Two periodicals each morning: “Page Six and The Information,” he said.—A.B.

Watching: Apple, an Actor and an Assassination

At first, “Manhunt” seems to present a boringly familiar story: the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by the coward John Wilkes Booth. But within a few minutes of beginning the Apple+ series, I realized how that story is generally consigned to no more than a few minutes of elementary-school history class, followed by maybe a few more minutes in high school. We actually don’t learn very much about the players and politics leading up to Lincoln’s assassination and what happened in the period immediately following it. 

“Manhunt,” which is based on an earlier book by the same name, relies on no fancy narrative trickery as it fills in those blanks, presenting a steady-handed, high-gloss series helmed capably by Anthony Boyle (“Masters of the Air,” “The Plot Against America”) as Booth and the more recognizable Tobias Menzies (“The Crown,” “Outlander”) as Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war who leads the titular endeavor while feuding with new President Andrew Johnson over Reconstruction. 

Just as Stanton knew he needed to quickly apprehend Booth before he could flee to Canada or Latin America, “Manhunt” understands the importance of alacrity, opting for a tight seven-episode run. Anymore than that and I suspect the show would’ve gotten bogged down in a Maryland swamp somewhere.—A.B.

Final Thought

Guess we’ll see if AI hardware gets nine lives or not.