There's a fun retrospective PoV which is that Silicon Valley has been through a sequence of consecutive hype waves, each of which has been viewed with derision

There's a fun retrospective PoV which is that Silicon Valley has been through a sequence of consecutive hype waves, each of which has been viewed with derision as mega-scale fraud or brainrot: - Video games (epic waste of time and moral debasement) gave us GPUs and NVIDIA - Social media (rage bait-fueled argument machine and cat pic repository) gave us a huge corpus of text on which to train language models. Yes scientific papers and Wikipedia are necessary but probably not sufficient? - Crypto (fraud, giant waste of resources) gave us a generation of young people who were comfortable building ludicrously oversized GPU clusters, and to some extent funded NVIDIA and TSMC R&D all of which led to where we are with AI, which is that it is making (in my humble opinion) impressive dents in the problem of solving intelligence -- cue HN commenters telling me that AI is a giant fraud and waste of resources also :)