How so?
Discussion
to misquote political strategist James Carville:
“it’s the technology, stupid.”
from the early days of semiconductors and mainframes in the 1960s and 1970s
through the personal computing boom of the 1980s
and into the internet and mobile revolutions of the late 1990s and 2000s
the Bay Area has repeatedly raced ahead of the rest of the world
each time, new technologies
( microprocessors, graphical user interfaces, online commerce, social media… )
were conceived and refined here before spreading globally
these waves established Silicon Valley as not only an engine of innovation and thus a magnet for talent and capital
location matters
AGI is a nerd’s dream in a way that mobile and social never were
demands new semiconductors to handle massive computation
requires novel memory architectures to process vast language models
needs breakthroughs in algorithms and deep computer science
the kind of technical stack-building that Silicon Valley was originally built for
large companies aren’t what makes the innovation, what reshape industries.
it’s (mostly) small companies, led by visionary, quixotic instigators that do.