The Weekend
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Jul 18, 2026 |
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| Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter: |
| • The Big Read: Trump’s AI agenda collides with reality |
| • Tech Culture: Welcome to the great private jet drought |
| • Plus, Recommendations—our weekly pop culture picks: “Gastronomics,” “Catch the Devil” and “The Invite” |
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| At the dawn of the AI boom, the technology sparked a real melee between newcomer startups and the industry’s established giants. A good amount of the energy in that fight seems to have diminished lately, with the contest appearing to turn into a slugfest between a handful of heavyweights: Google, Anthropic and OpenAI in the lead, trailed by a few other contenders, like Meta Platforms and SpaceXAI. |
| So that’s it—the biggies will grab all the laurels? It’s an outcome that has looked increasingly probable to me. Josh Elman, a longtime tech investor and executive, couldn’t disagree more. And so staunch is his belief in a forthcoming boom in consumer AI startups that he jumped ship a few weeks ago from working on Apple’s AI revamp to take up consumer investing at Andreessen Horowitz. Elman knows what he’s getting into: Before Apple, he was a longtime Greylock partner, where he led its investments in companies like Discord, Musical.ly, the predecessor company of TikTok, and Meerkat, which became Houseparty before Epic Games bought it. And before Greylock, he worked at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. |
| To rebut my pessimism, Elman likened the current moment to the dot-com era’s early days. “On the consumer adoption of AI, we’re still back in 1995—maybe 1996,” he said. My conversation with him, which has been edited for clarity and length, is below. |
| First things first, I need to ask: Will Siri actually work now? |
| Yes [laughs]. I think people have always wanted Siri just to be the thing that understands them and can help them just get stuff done on their device. I think it does great at that now. If you’re gonna comp Siri to Claude Cowork and try to ask it: “Make me a crazy presentation on blah-blah-blah-blah,” like, no—Siri’s not designed to do that at this time. |
| But if you do things like ask, “Call that Abe I was texting this morning,” that works. And I do it all the time because I forget people’s last names all the time. And here’s another example: I was driving to dinner, and I was coming to Palo Alto, getting off at an exit, and there’s two ways to go. I asked, “Navigate me to dinner with John.” And then it took me right to the restaurant—even though I hadn’t put the location on my calendar. We’d just texted about it. |
| So why leave Apple now? AI seems to just be getting interesting there. What made you want to return to venture capital—and specifically to do consumer startups? |
| When I left Greylock in 2020, I thought, “Consumer is dead. I don’t know if you can do that anymore.” And there have been a few companies, like Whatnot, which is an Andreessen company, and Suno. But there haven’t been that many consumer AI companies. And the common wisdom has been that OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and the model companies are going to define everything that’s interesting in the next 10 years. |
| What makes you so confident in defying that common wisdom? |
| When OpenClaw came out six, seven months ago, I was like, “Oh, I get it again.” The number of products that agentic AI can reinvent is going to lead to a Cambrian explosion that hasn’t happened yet in consumer. And I think now’s the window—now’s the time. |
| But I think of the OpenClaw craze as being pretty focused on a small, very Silicon Valley insider crowd who built work tools using it. |
| Of all the amazing examples of OpenClaw use that were shared with me, I think about Claire Vo and Jesse Genet, who are moms who have been talking about how they use OpenClaw to manage their families and their kids. [Vo is the founder of ChatPRD; Genet is the CEO and co-founder of Lumi.com.] |
| In the next six months, I think we’re going to see the embers of exciting things coming out in consumer AI. I don’t know exactly which ones will pop first. But two years from now, we’re going to start to see things that are, you know, a set of agents that help you manage your life, and you’ll be able to fine-tune them to accomplish what you want. |
Sure, consumer agents have real appeal. Won’t the biggest companies with their established, giant relationships with consumers—Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, even Apple—just dominate that, too, though?
Whether it’s finance, travel, health—yes, a lot of us are already turning to ChatGPT or, like, Doctor Google. But there are going to be products that are much richer and much more experiential. And they’re going to come from more than just those big players. |
| If a startup was trying to say, “I’m going to be the primary coding assistant,” well, that’s a category that’s fairly competitive now. There’s at least five of them. But for travel, there certainly isn’t anything yet. |
| One of the things I learned at Apple is: No matter how ambitious and big you are as a company, you can only do a number of things well. And you would rather do a number of things really, really, really well rather than try to do all the things. At some point, that gap between the number of things they can do really well and all the things possible leaves a lot of opportunity for everybody.—Abram Brown (abe@theinformation.com) |
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| The Big Read |
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| How staff turnover, turf battles and clashing views have derailed the administration’s anti-regulation vision. |
| Tech Culture |
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| Silicon Valley’s enormous surge in riches has turbocharged the market for new and used planes, energizing startups that offer innovative ways to gain access to an aircraft. |
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| Listening: “Gastronomics” |
| Alex Mayyasi, host of “Gastronomics,” a new podcast about food, business and the business of food, comes as finely pedigreed as a Thomas Keller–trained chef. Mayyasi is a longtime contributor to NPR’s “Planet Money” and earlier this year turned some of the show’s wit and wisdom into a bestselling book. Now cooking solo in his own kitchen, so to speak, Mayyasi has been applying his wonkish curiosity to topics such as menu forecasting, the bargain grocery wars and the internet-altering consequences of the Domino’s pizza tracker. I love a chance to rest my mind from thinking about how capitalism intersects with lines of code and instead turn it to the intricacies of private-label Cheerios and the commotion around gochujang chicken wings. |
| As I’d expect from a “Planet Money” veteran, Mayyasi does a fine job of establishing parallels between food companies and restaurant businesses and what else is happening in the corporate world. And I can tell that Mayyasi, who was employee No. 3 at Priceonomics, a short-lived, Y Combinator–backed media startup, is a techie at heart just by how he neatly likened Aldi, the sharp-elbowed discount grocery store, to Quince—you know, the internet’s sharp-elbowed discount cashmere store.—Abram Brown |
| Reading: “Catch the Devil” by Pamela Colloff |
| It is an idea as old as Adam and Eve: The devil can take many forms, many of them less obvious than one with cloven hooves. And there was nothing particularly remarkable in the figure of Paul Skalnik, a tubby schlub of a fellow whose down-home appearance belied his prodigious, decadeslong series of cons across the Gulf Coast. (A version of Skalnik would, in other words, make for an engrossing season of “True Detective.”) Skalnik was a fraudster, a robber and a covert polygamist: He married nine women, wedding some of them simultaneously. He was also a rat, and he kept himself out of any truly lengthy prison time by constantly informing to the authorities. He bamboozled them, too, and his testimony put four men on death row. |
| Skalnik’s indefatigable villainy—and the government’s own exacerbation of it—makes for a riveting yarn, one unspooled with great care and craft by Pamela Colloff, who has been telling such stories for “Texas Monthly” for many years. “Catch the Devil” is a chronicle of Skalnik’s misdeeds and his life, with Colloff tracking down an aged Skalnik in a Corsicana, Texas, nursing home, urging him to recant his testimony and save the life of one man still facing the death penalty. Colloff’s reporting is riveting true crime and a stern, well-documented plea for America’s criminal justice system to rethink how it handles informants.—A.B. |
| Watching: “The Invite” |
| I’m often struck by how the same creative impulses animate both Hollywood and Silicon Valley: In each, you can find enormous success by simply improving on someone else's idea. |
| “The Invite,” a witty sex comedy directed by Olivia Wilde, who also co-stars, iterates on a story originally from Barcelona-born writer-director Cesc Gay, who made it into a play and then a 2020 Spanish film. (Swiss, Korean and French adaptations have followed; a Dutch one is slated for 2027.) Wilde’s version retains the same basic premise: A rather unhip couple tries to enliven their faltering relationship by asking their free-spirited neighbors over to dinner. |
| Wilde plays one of the squares: out-of-work Angela, who is married to Joe (Seth Rogen), a music professor. Their guests are therapist Piña (Penélope Cruz) and ex-firefighter Hawk (Edward Norton), and their ensuing evening together is a night of entendre, horniness and disappointment: Seldom has a botched soufflé been a better-used metaphor. A large portion of the film was improvised by Wilde and her co-stars, a testament to their collective talent for comedic timing. The score, cinematography and editing are excellent, too—establishing a sense of voyeuristic anxiousness, a cross of Alfred Hitchcock and Woody Allen. Suffice it to say, I expect “The Invite” will find itself a guest of honor at next year’s Oscars; Rogen, as something like a frumpled, grown-up “Peanuts” character, will almost certainly get his first nomination. |
| A quibble: Most of the plot takes place within the apartment owned by Angela and Joe, but the broader setting is San Francisco. It would’ve made much more sense to place it someplace else. I find it impossible to imagine anyone in modern San Francisco being so unfamiliar with polyamory.—A.B. |
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