There was Gold Rush to California of 3 lac people from the rest of the US in 1848 when Marshall found gold here. It was a rapid influx of fortune seekers. It reached its peak in 1852. Of late, Silicon Valley, a region between San Francisco and San Jose, experienced dooms days, when people left for greener pastures elsewhere, say Miami, LA, New York or Puerto Rico. There was pandemic and people left the Bay Area. The headlines were the disaster of crypto currencies, discouraging share prices and the fall of Silicon Valley Bank that funded startups.
There is always a cloud with a silver lining. That came as AI. To be specific, generative AI. It started the new Gold Rush to California. Some 300 enthusiasts and entrepreneurs gathered for Generative AI Meeting of the Minds in May 2023 at Shack15, a swanky social club at the second floor of Ferry Building, San Francisco.
The mood was elevated by the host Peter Leyden, a futurist. He assured the gathering that with the advent of AI, somethings new is cracking open. The whole experience made tech circles buoyant once again.
AI has become the talk of the town. The industry had beat a retreat, but has now come forward to offer AI solutions.
Sam Altman’s OpenAI came up with ChatGPT and Google with Bard. There are image softwares, Dall-E and Midjourney. Altman was assisted financially by Microsoft — $10 billion were poured into OpenAI.
Generative AI brought the gravitas back to Silicon Valley. It all started with a group of 8 researchers at Google who laid the foundation of this with 2017 Vaswani’s and others paper called Attention Is All That You Need. OpenAI was taking cognizance of this development.
Long sequence of data or chunks of text were processed. Each word was weighed in relation to what preceded it. The grammatical structures were considered. It was a breakthrough when computers predicted the next word.
Bay Area at the valley was home to Big Tech, apart from Seattle in the north. Big Tech had hired AI talents for years. Now Google and DeepMind are combining. There are many startups who are mission-driven, and not salary-driven. They expect to be on par with OpenAI in next five years. AI has in fact brought a revival at Silicon Valley. Palo Alto offices of Character AI are creating chatbots.
Employees here process the data in front of high-power computers. These people have practised what OpenAI is doing today.
Of course, there are AI skeptics. AI models lack accuracy. There are issues of bias. There could be an AI hangover or a meltdown. However, AI is not another bubble. Young engineers and entrepreneurs are making it more and more power-packed.