The Information
Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter: • The Big Read: Meet the father of Claude Code • Artificial Intelligence: The hijinks around tokenmaxxing • Plus, Recommendations—our weekly pop culture picks: “ Who Blew Up the Georgia Guidestones? ” “ Those Who Are About to Die ” and “ It Was Just an Accident ” Over a good many years , “Silicon Valley,” the HBO show, accomplished a very rare feat: It got the elite of Silicon Valley, the place, to laugh at themselves and take themselves a little less seriously, an achievement as difficult as explaining, say, quantum computing. It’s no easy task to win over the set you’re lampooning, making the series’s tech land popularity a real testament to showrunner Mike Judge, who, beneath the gags, often presented techies as bleakly as “Veep” portrayed our nation’s politicos. As tech has gotten zanier lately, a pressure campaign among fans has mounted for Judge to reboot his show. He has flatly refused . On Sunday evening, a new AMC show, “The Audacity,” hopes to begin occupying the cultural space Judge has given up. The show is dark, funny and detailed, much as you’d expect from its creator, Jonathan Glatzer, a former “Succession” writer, who enjoys skewering tech mogulness as much as “Succession” delighted in aping Murdochian antics. Where “Silicon Valley” had Pied Piper and “Succession” had Waystar Royco, “The Audacity” has Hypergnosis, a startup run by CEO Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen). He has just fumbled a sale of his startup to a bigger competitor, Cupertino (yes, really), and faces any number of consequences for it. Duncan is someone who has thrived through ample self-confidence and a nice smile, but bless him, he’s dim, managing tries at software-is-eating-the-world grand thoughts with the delicacy of Yogi Berra. (In one heated exchange, he confuses Nostradamus and Nosferatu.) Unsurprisingly, he’s in therapy, but by the end of the pilot, he has used an all-powerful, data-guzzling AI to blackmail his counselor (Sarah Goldberg) into becoming a co-conspirator. Duncan’s domestic life is a mess, too, as he and his wife, Lili (Lucy Punch), trade emotional barrages through their pursuit of an open marriage. As these adults scamper and scheme, their children are collateral damage, warped both by their parents’ poor parenting and, of course, the tech products that underpin the prosperity around them. “I think there are attributes to the Valley that deserve interrogation,” Glatzer said, following a screening of the show I attended earlier this week. “You know that move-fast-and-break-things mentality—a bull-in-a-china-shop metaphor—has become something positive, when in fact it’s like, ‘No, there’s gonna be a lot of broken dishes.’” Like “Succession,” “The Audacity” has a high-gloss verisimilitude, which is part of the satire. Many of the interiors resemble an OpenAI demo video; I noticed an expensive-looking revolving door that I swear I’ve seen before in a Hillsborough mansion. To burnish the authenticity, Glatzer took as many Bay Area meetings as he could get. Mostly, he met a warm reception—with a notable exception. “Nobody from Apple would talk with me,” he recalled. “It’s probably why Cupertino is mentioned [in the show] so many times.” While Silicon Valley is littered with the detritus of failed startups, Hollywood back lots are piled up with the remains of shows about tech and startups that never quite took off. Netflix tried one with Rob Lowe in 2023, “Unstable,” for instance, and even though it was very funny, it flopped. Likewise, the more somber “Devs” from director Alex Garland went nowhere on FX. And AMC had only limited luck getting people interested in “Halt and Catch Fire,” a tale about the 1980s PC revolution. Glatzer hopes he has made Duncan’s graspingness recognizable enough to win over a wide audience—from within Silicon Valley and outside it, too. “He’s a wannabe titan, and I think that gives him a desperation—a desire to climb up the rungs of the ladder—that makes him relatable,” he said. “He’s not a billionaire. We discussed this, and we estimated that he’s worth just $500 million.” What else from this week… Speaking of an all-powerful AI, Anthropic’s Mythos model has freaked out a lot of people , including the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department . In California, the Salton Sea is an environmental disaster. The lake is also, as Gov. Gavin Newsom termed it, something akin to “the Saudi Arabia of lithium.” The half-million-dollar, “Survivor”-themed outing in Honduras thrown by Plex, a streaming video startup, may be the Fyre Festival of corporate retreats . Between the death of Sora and Ben Affleck selling his AI startup to Netflix for possibly as much as $600 million, I’d wager that the sentiment on AI will shift pretty noticeably in Hollywood this year. I suspect we’ll hear more filmmakers such as Steven Soderbergh express sentiments like this one : “AI has been helpful in creating thematically surreal images that occupy a dream space rather than a literal space. And that’s been really fun because you need a Ph.D. in literature to tell it what to do.” The New York Times appended a pointed editor’s note to that viral story about a two-person health tech that used AI to zoom off to $1.8 billion in sales. Want to stop anesthetizing your kids with a smartphone when you’re out to dinner? A more pertinent shopping guide may never have existed. Tax day is nigh, and accountants have no idea what to do with their clients’ prediction market spoils. —Abram Brown ( abe@theinformation.com ) . Weekend’s Latest Stories The Big Read How a Self-Taught Programmer Became the Father of Claude Code Anthropic’s Boris Cherny has given the AI startup its breakthrough hit , with its revenue continuing to skyrocket past $2.5 billion. Artificial Intelligence The ‘Tokenmaxxing’ Tide May Already Be Turning The practice of maximizing token usage may have caught on with employees at Meta and elsewhere. But companies in most of the business world are developing other ways of encouraging AI use among staff. Listening: “ Who Blew Up the Georgia Guidestones? ” “Some people are convinced that aliens built the Guidestones,” explains Tyler McBrien, a journalist and Georgia native long fascinated by the pair of Stonehenge-esque granite pillars that towered over a stretch of the state near its South Carolina border. “Other people just know that the lizard people were behind it.” For more than two decades, the Guidestones’ central riddle was their creator’s identity: They’d been commissioned in secret, then erected by a local masonry outfit. In 2022, the mystery deepened further when someone destroyed them. McBrien tries to unravel both ends of the puzzle, and in the process, he ends up presenting a picture of the fears, passions and obsessions that drew people to the enigmatic monument. —Abram Brown Reading: “ Those Who Are About to Die ” by Harry Sidebottom Think days have gotten long in this era of 996 and AI FOMO? Eh, you’ve got it easy! A day as a gladiator in Ancient Rome’s fighting pits—now that was a test of workplace survival. In “Those Who Are About to Die,” Harry Sidebottom, a novelist and Oxford University don, structures his dry-humored history of Roman gladiators based on the 24 hours that typically surrounded a match, beginning with the celebratory supper the previous evening and carrying through to the stadium procession and final showdown. It is a keen-eyed study of a small segment of Rome’s population, which in turn reflects much about how that grand civilization functioned as a whole, particularly the relationship between the poor and the powerful. And Sidebottom’s details are memorable. Contrary to popular depiction, gladiators resemble nothing like Kirk Douglas —or even Russell Crowe . They were pudgy, and for good reason: Their carb-heavy diets—a lot of barley and beans—meant a “thick layer of subcutaneous fat that shielded vital organs,” Sidebottom writes. “This enabled the combatants to take flesh wounds that would bleed profusely but would not prevent them from continuing to fight. Fat gladiators made a better visual spectacle.” A gladiatorial career tended to last around three years, and combatants stood a better chance of walking away from a match still breathing than we generally imagine; Sidebottom estimates they had roughly a 90% chance of surviving a bout, though obviously many exited with injuries. Still, it took a toll on many of the men, and on the eve of battle, the games’ organizers often placed them under a strict suicide watch. But as the historian Seneca notes in one account, such restrictions still couldn’t prevent one particularly depressed gladiator from taking his life by visiting the communal commode and swallowing the sponge kept there for washing up. —A.B. Watching: “ It Was Just an Accident ” The basic premise of “It Was Just an Accident” makes this Iranian film sound like a slog: After many years, a former prisoner, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), seemingly has the chance to exact revenge on Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), the man who tortured him for so long. It is more complicated, though, and funnier, too, because Vahid isn’t absolutely positive that the man he’s just confined in a makeshift jail cell—the back of a van—is his former tormentor. Mostly, he’s basing his judgment on the fact that the torturer had a fake leg, and so does the guy rattling around like a box of leftovers in the rear. He decides he needs help verifying the man’s identity and motors around Tehran, enlisting other people he knows who suffered the same fate he did; he even convinces a bride to abandon her wedding. They’re after a dark truth, but with a sharp script and bright-eyed editing, their quest isn’t an unpleasant one to follow from the passenger seat. —A.B.
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