San Francisco’s Robo-Fight Club, General Catalyst’s Divisive Virality

Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• The Big Read: Why Trump officials and VCs love a nuclear power startup’s brute-force approach

• Biotech: The case of the disappearing embryo startups 

• Plus, Recommendations—our weekly pop culture picks: “Are We Doomed?” “Steve Jobs in Exile” and “Lord of the Flies”

The legal slugfest between Elon Musk and Sam Altman enraptured Silicon Valley this week. On Thursday, I attended another gladiatorial spectacle: MMA-style fights between humanoid robots in a SoMa nightclub. 

The match, which went down in an octagonal cage, attracted a couple hundred people wearing Hawaiian shirts and Lululemon stretchy trousers, who whooped and egged on the child-size robots to duke it out. “They’re kinda cute,” an OpenAI engineer told me. “They’re so derpy.”

Robot Fight Night and Dance Off was a marketing stunt for Nebius, a cloud computing company eager to hype itself. China-based Unitree made the robots, but they were programmed by Ultimate Fighting Bots, a humanoid sports league, which used Nebius’ cloud platform to train and choreograph the fighters.

As AI continues to bubble, bubble, bubble, investors and founders are short-circuiting over robotics. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang sees bots as AI’s next frontier, and Elon Musk is touting Optimus as “Tesla’s biggest product ever.” Startups have raised tens of billions of dollars; Brett Adcock’s humanoid Figure notched a $39 billion valuation last year. 

Those companies hope to replace millions of jobs on factory floors and in nursing homes. Throwing these bots into a cage match hypes them as objects of entertainment, too. Or, as Shane Wilson, a partner at deep tech–focused VC firm Citta Capital, told me at the fight night, watching robots wallop each other demonstrates “the testosterone bias in early-stage startups.” 

The sweaty, strobey SoMa scene was Burning Man meets bar mitzvah. An emcee in a fedora and sequined blazer hurled free hats and T-shirts into the crowd. A referee in a hard hat and laboratory goggles called the shots, while a DJ spun electronic beats from a turntable. Few attendees, as often happens in San Francisco these days, frequented the bar, though I did witness one DFMO: dance floor make-out.

Operated by partygoers thumbing a videogame controller, the bots waddled across the stage, unintentionally shadowboxing each other. “Can someone find the head?” the emcee chirped to the operators during one round after neither bot landed a single shot. They stumbled and swung and swayed. Another OpenAI employee remarked that the robots hadn’t improved much since he’d seen them last year. 

The eight cage matches convinced me that the cyborg uprising will look less like an army of Terminators and more like a gangly gaggle of goons. Human or otherwise—when one bot’s blow finally hurled the other bot to the ground, I wondered, “Did that hurt?”—Julia Hornstein ([email protected]) 

General Catalyst’s Attention Grab

Many venture capitalists are quite adept at doing Moe-Larry-Curly routines online, causing a ruckus and picking fights with each other. Generally, the folks at General Catalyst show little interest in the games, but this week, they decided to have a bit of fun: They released a marketing video that portrayed the firm as a responsible, sober-minded outfit—and other VC firms as just the opposite. It used a robo-dog as a prop and has been viewed 2.5 million times on Twitter. 

The clip’s virality was propelled in no small part by Marc Andreessen and his staff, who took special umbrage to the advertisement. It took me a second to realize why, and then I got it: The dopey, reckless VC in the video looks an awful lot like Andreessen. 

Since the video was so out of character for General Catalyst, it has become widely discussed among VCs. Plenty of them think it’s in bad taste; when I called around to gossip about it, one investor described it as “tacky and boring.” A couple others were puzzled about why General Catalyst had chosen to burn specifically Andreessen in effigy. Of course, anyone who has been faithfully reading Weekend would remember that Andreessen and General Catalyst have a history of disagreeing.

I expect we’ll see and hear more from General Catalyst in the coming future. It has long seemed to be positioning itself for an IPO. Plus, it recently hired a youngster named Reggie James as its creative director: James is a savant at internet gags and attracting attention online; he previously ran a videogame startup, Eternal, and when I worked at Forbes, I put him on the 30 Under 30 list. Obviously, he’s lost none of his talent for driving the web nuts.—Abram Brown ([email protected]) 

Weekend’s Latest Stories

The Big Read

Why Trump Officials and VCs Love a Nuclear Power Startup’s Brute-Force Approach

Valar Atomics plans to turn on its first nuclear reactor in the Utah desert in the next few weeks. The company is the poster child of a new breed of nuclear startup built on aggressive claims and breakneck timelines.

Biotech

Silicon Valley Likes the Idea of Gene-Edited Embryos. It’ll Be a Wait 

The technology could help eliminate genetic diseases. Yet it remains deeply controversial—it could possibly produce superkids, too—and the startups interested in it face an array of challenges. 

Listening: “Are We Doomed?” 

Armageddon’s a funny matter. It gets much discussed, and it causes a good amount of fear and worry. But the thing is, no one can quite agree on the details—on what will actually bring about the End. 

“Are We Doomed?” explores the endless apocalyptic permutations that confront us. So far, host Ben Bradford has looked at several grim scenarios, including nuclear warfare, supervolcano eruptions and genocidal mosquitoes. (Just skip the one on AI; yes, I’m tired of AI doomerism, too.) Bradford, an able Virgil to these various hellscapes, approaches the topics with good-humored rigor, gaming out the scenarios in depth. (The vibes reminded me of Wired’s front-of-book sections from the 2000s and 2010s.) Slick, lighthearted sound editing and production keep things zipping along. 

After a couple episodes, I came to see the great flexibility in Bradford’s conceit. Yes, we tend to dwell on a few traditional worries about how doomsday might arrive: plagues, zombies, visiting in-laws. But the world contains an almost infinite number of perils. Bradford could do the podcast for years and never come close to trodding over the same ashen ground. Editorially, it’s an exciting prospect. As a matter of civilization’s existence, it’s unsettling to contemplate the vast variety of possible calamities.—Abram Brown

Reading: “Steve Jobs in Exile” by Geoffrey Cain

The 12 years between Steve Jobs’ ousting from Apple and his return to the company account for nearly a fifth of his life. Yet the period generally gets scant attention in the constant examination and reexamination of his existence. Geoffrey Cain, a contributor to publications like Time and The Economist and the author of 2020’s “Samsung Rising,” thinks Jobs’ wilderness years merit greater study. (Walter Isaacson gave up just around 40 pages of his definitive Jobs biography to this era.) And Cain goes to the task with great fervor in “Steve Jobs in Exile,” peering closely into Jobs’ building of Next and Pixar, his follow-up acts after Apple. 

Cain offers glimpses of a familiar Jobs, the obsessive who ordered the tile grout replaced in Next’s headquarters when the contractors initially installed the wrong color, spending $20,000 to do so. Jobs’ profligacy particularly came to rankle H. Ross Perot, one of his biggest backers, and Perot quit Next’s board around the same time he decided to stage his ill-fated run for the presidency: Seemingly, he’d decided a third-party bid for the White House was a better use of his time than convincing Jobs to care about profitability. 

But while Jobs acted imperiously at Next, he agreed to share power at Pixar with co-founder John Lasseter. And while Next ultimately flopped—its sophisticated but expensive Cube computer never found a sizable market—Pixar ushered in the digital animation revolution. 

Cain came away from his research for the book convinced that Jobs couldn’t have returned to Apple and thrived without those experiences at Next and Pixar. “At Next, he was a control freak, but at Pixar, he learned some of these lessons that you can’t be a dictator going around doing everything yourself,” Cain said in an interview. “It’s what taught him to become more circumspect. And it’s what allowed him to build the Apple we know today.”—A.B.

Watching:  “Lord of the Flies” 

Life is full of surprises—as Piggy, Ralph, Jack and the other stranded British schoolboys from “Lord of the Flies” come to understand fully well. But I’d like to make what I think is a pretty safe guess about the future: Several of the child actors who turn in such excellent performances in Netflix’s adaptation of the William Golding classic have a very good chance at going on to major stardom. Winston Sawyers and Lox Pratt are both quite good in their respective roles as Ralph (personifying bravery) and Jack (brutality). Perhaps the tyke with the most special talent is David McKenna, who brings a roly-poly pathos to Piggy (braininess). Showrunner Jack Thorne, who also co-created last year’s standout “Adolescence,” obviously agrees with me: The series opens on a rosy-cheeked McKenna lying stunned and alone after the fateful plane crash, a fun nod to “Lost.”

Thorne’s “Lord of the Flies” benefits throughout its four episodes from exceptional cinematography, with frames full of blurred edges and tight close-ups, which made me think about Martin Schoeller photographs. The script, meanwhile, remains largely unaltered from the original story: Dread and violence mount as the boys divide up tasks, forming groups of hunters and builders. They devolve—death follows. I appreciated Thorne resisting any urge to modernize or enlarge Golding’s source material. Clearly, he understands a truism as pertinent to Hollywood as it is to Silicon Valley: An update can break more than it fixes.—A.B.