Welcome back to Forests Over Trees, your tech strategy newsletter. It’s time to zoom out, connect dots, and (try to) predict the future.

Here’s today’s plan:

• Tech News Takes — digestible analysis and commentary

• F/T Shoutouts — sharing other cool stuff we’ve found

• Tool of the Week — tools you’ll find useful

An OpenAI social network!?

Plus: Topgolf for pool; Hugging Face's robotics acquisition

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⚡ Tech News Takes ⚡

An OpenAI social network!?

• What’s up: OpenAI is working on a prototype of a social network. For now, it has a feed focused on image generation, and is rumored to be integrated with ChatGPT, the same way xAI’s Grok is integrated with X. CEO Sam Altman is secretly requesting feedback on the idea from a small group of people, and there are no concrete plans to launch it.

• So what: This is pretty fascinating. First, Sam is clearly pumped about their new, wildly popular image generation tool (and all the Studio Ghibli memes and content it spawned). And he’s likely wondering how the benefits of viral moments like that can be captured on a platform OpenAI owns, rather than going to X and xAI, where people are posting the memes/images. Second, I’m still very bearish on OpenAI’s long term prospects as a purely AI-focused frontier model company. Making moves towards being a social media app, a messaging app, etc. would do wonders for their longevity.

Topgolf founders are doing tech-infused pool now

• What’s up: The creators of Topgolf have raised $34 million to launch Poolhouse, a chain for augmented reality-enhanced pool and high-end food and drink. The first location will open near London’s Liverpool Street Station in January 2026. They plan to expand to franchises and U.S. locations, trying to replicate Topgolf’s success in the growing “competitive socialization” space.

• So what: I love this idea. Topgolf has been a huge success because it infused tech into an already popular sport, used that tech to make it easier for beginners to enjoy, and created an atmosphere that was fun for all (kids, adults, non-golfers, dates, parties, etc.). I think we’ll continue to see the trend of competition-oriented, tech-infused 3rd places for people to come together. Plus, Poolhouse has a much smaller footprint than the 5+ football fields Topgolf needs, so there’s potential for it to grow even faster.

Other quick hits

• Yesterday, Nvidia wrote-off $5.5B… due to the Trump administration’s export restrictions to China. That surprised the markets (and yours truly), since CEO Jensen Huang had a meeting with Trump just last week, where it sounded like Nvidia negotiated to avoid those restrictions.

• Perplexity to partner with Samsung… to get their AI assistant onto Samsung’s Galaxy devices. It could be pre-loaded, or available for Perplexity users to set as the default AI tool on-device. They’ve already inked a similar deal with Motorola.

• xAI‘s Grok model gets memory… so users get better responses. With the feature, Grok will take prior chats into account. This is a feature ChatGPT has had for a while, but that others have struggled to match. Microsoft’s “recall” feature, for example, was delayed an entire year over user privacy concerns.

🌲 F/T Shoutouts 🌲

• Visualizing the US economy — The team at Visual Capitalist always delivers. Can’t believe the size of housing and healthcare… more than $6 trillion total!

  

• More Kodiak — Aside from the awkward Q&A at the beginning (haha), this is a short/sweet intro to Kodiak, the self-driving truck co we talked about earlier

🛠️ Tool of the Week 🛠️

You’ve heard the hype. It’s time for results.

For all the buzz around agentic AI, most companies still aren't seeing results. But that's about to change. See real agentic workflows in action, hear success stories from our beta testers, and learn how to align your IT and business teams.

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