Silicon Valley on Another Manic Quest to Change the World
A guide to the new AI technologies, evangelists, skeptics and everyone else caught up in the flood of cash and enthusiasm reshaping the industry.
In late May, 300 entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, journalists and assorted self-described thought leaders crammed into Shack15, a stylish social club on the second floor of San Francisco’s Ferry Building, where most spoke in soaring terms about what they saw as the next gold rush. The gathering, dubbed a “Generative AI Meeting of the Minds,” would’ve been unthinkable during the pandemic and improbable earlier this year, when the city’s main obsessions often seemed to be car break-ins and retail store closures. The night had the feel of a religious revival. “Something is happening, something is cracking open,” said the evening’s host, futurist writer Peter Leyden, in the first of many upbeat speeches. Just as everyone “was talking about the demise of San Francisco, how everyone is leaving the Bay Area, how no one wants to live in California, how we are in doom loops—that’s exactly the time you know the place is right about to burst open in reinvention,” Leyden said to applause. The speech, the whole event, captured the feeling coursing through tech circles these days: Silicon Valley is back.