Hi, welcome to your Weekend.
For the reporters and editors at The Information, the Thanksgiving holiday couldn’t have come at a better time: We needed to sleep!
The same is undoubtedly true for the staff at OpenAI, who watched their CEO and president get whacked; an interim CEO promoted and then demoted; another interim CEO hired and met with “f— you” emojis on Slack; and a board of directors whittled from six members to four to three (including Larry Summers!)—all over the course of 120 unhinged hours. If you somehow missed all the madness (see one exemplary tweet at bottom), Paris and Julia brilliantly recapped the whole exhausting saga in this week’s cover story.
In the midst of it all, Matteo Franceschetti, CEO of Silicon Valley’s favorite smart-mattress company Eight Sleep, tweeted that San Franciscans saw a spike in “low-quality sleep” during the affair. We wondered, how did the OpenAI blowup compare to other recent events on the sleep-deprivation scale?
We turned to the good people at Eight Sleep, who provided the following data for two U.S. tech centers, San Francisco and New York:
As you can see, the OpenAI drama was rivaled only by New Year’s Eve, the Silicon Valley Bank meltdown and the implosion of the Titanic-exploring submersible for median sleep loss in San Francisco. In New York, apparently, summer Fridays are also bad for sleep, which makes sense if you’ve ever been stuck in late-night Hamptons traffic.
When it was all over, one of the OpenAI coup organizers, former board member Helen Toner, spoke for the entire tech community: “And now, we all get some sleep.” Amen to that.
Now onto this week’s stories...
the big read
From King to Exile to King Again: The Inside Story of Sam Altman’s Whiplash Week
For more than a year, OpenAI had been on a glide path to AI dominance—then came five days of self-inflicted chaos that shook an industry. Julia and Paris broke down the minute-by-minute story of how Sam Altman survived a palace coup.
gift hunting
The Information’s Top Tech-Adjacent Gifts for 2023
With all of the turmoil afoot, you may have forgotten about another matter of pressing concern: It’s gifting season, people! We’re here to offer you some respite from the crazy news cycle with our annual guide to what’s worth buying. Here, 25 gift picks tested and loved by Team Information.
scene and heard
While One Hero of Crypto Crumbled, Another Raged On in Amsterdam
In the final week of October, over 3,000 crypto believers descended into woods on the outskirts of Amsterdam. At the same time, 3,600 miles away in Manhattan, another crypto party was coming to a decisive, calamitous end. Report Kari McMahon details the scene at Solana’s Breakpoint conference.
Watching: A Silicon Valley spoof hits home
On Monday, as Team Information was swirling around the yet-resolved OpenAI crisis, tech’s favorite comedian Alexis Gay released her own take on the hysteria. Funny in a too-close-to-home way, the clip satirized what we were all going through that weekend—“this is living through history!” she gasped. When Gay jolted up off the couch and shrieked, “HE TWEETED!,” we felt seen. But the best part of the video was, obviously, the pair of references to The Information’s own reporting. First, Gay uttered a line we’ve all heard countless times: “I read the Information article… well I didn’t read the article, I read the headline.” And then the clincher, when Gay put in a call to our colleague Natasha Mascarenhas, apparently hoping for a backdoor to a subscription. “The whole paywall?” explained Natasha, patiently. "That’s the business model.” Indeed it is, Alexis, indeed it is. —Annie
Reading: What Office Gen do you belong to?
Your manager sends you the message, “Please come see me in my office.” What do you feel? The formal, punctuated phrase (the dreaded period!) is enough to strike fear in the hearts of a younger generation. But it might sound perfectly pleasant to a Boomer. This week, the Washington Post released a quiz that attempts to guess your age bracket based on your workplace communications. As hard as I try not to sound cheugy (a word that describes Millennial cringe, which I’m pretty sure is now considered cheugy itself), my Gen Z colleagues will hardly be surprised to learn that I got, “You sound most like a Millennial at work." (The other day I got called out for asking my coworker to “turn on Instagram.”) But hey, we’ve all got problems: The quiz also identifies Gen Z as the most likely to cope poorly with feedback and take a “mental health day” because they spilled coffee on their shirt. As we Millennials would say, LOL. — Julia
Noticing: Easter eggs in tech news
Over the weekend, as the OpenAI board ousted CEO Sam Altman, company insiders’ tweets were dissected like a techie talmud. When Altman tweeted “I love you all,” many theorized that Altman had spelled out the acronym “ILYA”—pointing the finger at OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever for orchestrating the coup. As OpenAI employees tweeted different colored heart emojis, some saw diverging loyalties hidden in the hues. (In the end, the hearts likely meant nothing, but the ILYA conspiracy theory might have had merit.) Easter eggs infiltrated crypto this week too: When former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao posted pictures of himself raising four fingers, extremely-online sleuths speculated that it was a reference to a $4 billion settlement sought by the Department of Justice. It probably wasn’t, but all these real and imagined dog-whistles show how desperate we’ve become for reliable information in a trust-less environment. Perhaps we should all learn a lesson from Taylor Swift fans, who read too far into social media posts and, as a result, spread straight-up lies. —Margaux
Makes You Think
If you are that employee, our DMs are open!
Until next Weekend, thanks for reading.
—Jon
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