From one of our favorite podcasts, “The Techmeme Ride Home,” we are borrowing the idea that on each Friday we’ll give our readers something they can enjoy reading over the upcoming weekend. Techmeme dubs them “weekend long reads” and that title seems good enough for us to adopt for our offering here.

For our inaugural “WLR” (yes—we have decided to abbreviate it because all cool things seem to have an abbreviated name, IYKYK) our first recommended read will be tech-centric. That is because this particular topic is too important for everyone’s lives.

Artificial Intelligence is one of those things that many people (including us) think they understand enough about. But truthfully they probably don’t. You may have used ChatGPT, or one of its cousins such as Co-Pilot from Microsoft, Claude from Anthropic, Grok from X, Gemini from Google, etc. We would certainly place ourselves in this category.

We know precious little, and that makes us both confident and dangerous at the same time.

AI is nothing short of a global arms race, posing a tech phenomenon. But fortunately there is someone who can help make us all smarter about it. Her name is Mary Meeker, and if you aren’t familiar with her work, she is a venture capitalist and former Wall Street analyst. For years, Meeker chronicled the meteoric rise of the internet with an annual “Internet Trends Report.” It was a must read for anyone for anyone trying to understand how the internet was changing everything about everything.

Last week, Meeker and the team at her VC firm Bond Capital, put out her first report since 2019, when she stopped publishing her previous “Internet Trends Report.” This new report, all 340 pages of it, focuses on the most disruptive technology since…well, the internet.

And that technology would be Artificial Intelligence.

But their “Trends In Artificial Intelligence” report can be a tough read for mere mortals, so we found an excellent summary analysis on Substack that does a really great job of making Meeker’s in-depth report understandable to those of us who haven’t taken all the AP classes along the way.

Our first WLR recommendation goes to “Nate’s Substack” and this particular article which we found interesting, surprising and essential to understand what the future with AI has in store for us. Click here to read it for yourself.

Fair warning, while far more approachable than the original report, this can still be a “heavy” read at times. If you might be in the mood for something a little more entertaining to digest over your weekend, allow us to also provide the inaugural “WLR-Alternative” recommendation.

And that would be our favorite acerbic columnist Drew Magary’s evisceration of CNN’s Jake Tapper in his article: “Jake Tapper is the reason American is doomed.”

Have a good weekend everybody, we’ll see you back here next week.

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