Last week, something truly remarkable happened. An honest-to-god Silicon chip developer, founded in a Sunnyvale Denny’s, briefly became the most valuable company on Earth.
It’s remarkable not because Nvidia was suddenly so valuable (it wasn’t), but because of what the moment represents to those of us who, against all reason, are still captivated by Silicon Valley’s magic.
Obviously, if you’re 20 or under, the idea of believing in the tech industry sounds ludicrous. You grew up in a world with tech billionaires so toxic and ubiquitous that I might as well be talking about the magic of microplastics.
But for those of us who chose to move here and whose memories stretch back at least a decade, I’ll bet the news about Nvidia gave you a similar jolt of nostalgia.
For me, the memory sparked was from 1998. I’d just turned 17 and was living with my parents in a tiny, Marplesque English village, harboring a vague ambition to be a writer. A friend gave me a used copy of The First $20 Million is the Hardest, Po Bronson’s sublime novel about a group of engineers racing to build a then-unthinkable $300 computer. By the time I reached the halfway point, I knew: I had to move to Silicon Valley and write about this wonderful madness.
Silicon Valley, as described by Bronson and his contemporaries—Michael Wolff, Jerry Kaplan and Douglas Coupland, whose work I also devoured—was a place where the future was being invented and reinvented at the speed of light. It was a place where idealists were locked in a battle with capitalist gatekeepers, with no lesser stakes than the future of civilization. But also a very human place, filled with backbiting, betrayal and piles and piles of money. Bradbury meets Orwell, with just a hint of Jackie Collins.
By the time I made it to the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 2000s, I found a place different from the one I’d read about a decade earlier, but no less thrilling: I witnessed the rise of Facebook, the launch of the iPhone, the creation of the sharing economy. I ate fried chicken with future billionaires at parties where term sheets were sketched on paper tablecloths.
Bronson, Wolff et al. had done such an excellent job of characterizing tech assholes that I felt déjà vu when I encountered Messrs. Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Travis Kalanick in real life. These weird, amoral guys (most preferred the word “libertarian”) were indisputably reshaping the world, just as their work raised unavoidable moral questions about privacy, addiction and labor. The world was being disrupted in every sense of the word. And the Bay Area was the center of it all.
Until it wasn’t. By the second decade of the new millennium, the dream of Silicon Valley was dead. The cult of disruption had proven to be a gateway drug, leading to the full-blown hucksterism of NFTs, crypto and the metaverse. The dreamers and the doers had become grotesquely rich; money doing what money always does, turning the worst of them into Trump-supporting, Nazi-platforming, self-described predators, happy to pal around with murderers on their way to jail.
The center of power had shifted too. From the Valley to San Francisco and then to New York and Los Angeles and—god help us all—Miami. By 2021, the story of Silicon Valley was no longer about terrible people building wonderful things, but terrible people building… nothing much at all. No innovation, no complicated moral questions, no tension. Just fad after fad designed to juice the markets and fleece consumers, a final crash from which it could never recover.
But here’s the thing: Silicon Valley always recovers.
A surprising savior
What nobody could have predicted was the identity of its savior. Not Nvidia—that’s a symptom, not the cause. I’m talking, reluctantly, about Sam Altman, the creepy, perpetually fired former head of YCombinator who in late 2022, seemingly out of nowhere, announced that his company, OpenAI, had invented the future.
God knows we old-timers tried to be cynical about ChatGPT, pedantically insisting that AI was actually just machine learning and that Altman’s new toy was nothing but cheap mimicry. But the rest of the world knew better: Here, as if by magic, was a friendly ghost that could tell stories, write code and conjure photographs from thin air. Here again was the same jolt of wonder we felt when we did our first Google search or watched Steve Jobs hold up his little glass rectangle, multiplied by a thousand.
Barely a year later, we are experiencing the Summer of AI. Click on any news site, tune into any news channel. Listen at any bar, in any rideshare. Or better yet, walk around the Mission and overhear the idealistic children bleating into cellphones about term sheets. Consider the corresponding silence from the “San Francisco is dead” billionaires, sculking back to the city (if they ever really left) with checkbooks outstretched to anyone with a .ai email address.
And they’re right to do so because, although I hate to say it, the AI hype is real. Microsoft knows it, Google knows it and the markets know it. Even Apple—a company famed for its contrarian refusal to chase trends—has been forced to bend its knee.
And yes! It’s entirely reasonable, some might say obligatory, to think Altman is a venal little turd, a “psychologically abusive” snake oil salesman whose company is built on large-scale intellectual property theft. (This is the same Altman who, while at YC, threatened to make up smear stories about my fellow journalists after we wrote critically about one of his companies.)
Again, I refer you to the history books. Napster was powered by stolen IP, credit card payments were pioneered by pornographers and Jeff Bezos was (and is) a hedge fund douchebag. Looking further back, I hold aloft exhibit A: That Silicon Valley was built on a foundation of defense dollars and casual misogyny. With each new leap forward we have always had to ask, “At what cost?” Or more prosaically: Who do these fuckers think they are?
But to answer that question you had to come here, to this little corner of Northern California, where this complicated future was being built. Because, for good and ill, Silicon Valley and the wider Bay Area were the center of the universe. I truly believed that at age 17, just as right now, a new generation of 17-year-olds is believing it all over again as they read about OpenAI.
Altman might be a snake oil salesman, but the product he’s selling has restored Silicon Valley to rude health. And for that reason—perhaps only for that reason—he deserves the credit.
Paul Bradley Carr has written about Silicon Valley for 25 years. His next book, The Confessions, will be published next year by Atria. paulbradleycarr.com