Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley

Last week, I watched a young guy at the coffee shop make the barista's entire day. Not with a big tip or elaborate compliment, just a genuine "thank you so much" and eye contact that said he actually saw her as a person, not just a caffeine dispenser. The barista's shoulders relaxed, her smile turned real, and suddenly the whole atmosphere shifted.

ChatGPT owner OpenAI has a workforce double the size of Anthropic, while Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google have 228,000 and 183,000 staff respectively, and boast enormous capital positions and distribution networks. Yet Anthropic's AI tools for generating computer code and operating computers go beyond anything these larger companies have managed to launch. OpenAI and Microsoft have struggled to ship products with as much impact recently.

Remember when getting someone's phone number meant writing it down on a piece of paper? Or when making plans required actually sticking to them because there was no way to send a last-minute "running late!" text? There's a fascinating divide happening between millennials who remember these pre-smartphone days and those who don't, and it's showing up in ways we're only beginning to understand.

What makes them different? After years of observing human behavior and diving into the psychology behind our social habits, I've noticed that people who genuinely enjoy eating alone in public share some fascinating traits. We've all seen these people. Maybe you are one of them. While others fidget with their phones or rush through their food when dining solo, these individuals savor every bite, unbothered by the social conventions that make many of us squirm at the thought of a table for one.

So my thesis is that the internet, originally, was conceived as a very decentralized, communitarian network. It was funded by government money. And, in the late 80s, early 90s, when these libertarians came out of Silicon Valley, it changed radically. They understood that the internet could be a winner-takes-all business, and that there would be a single winner in search, a single winner in e-commerce, and, eventually, what developed as social networks; a single winner in that. And that's essentially what happened.

A significant number of Santa Clara County residents say they're considering leaving the Bay Area, a reflection of the persistent frustration over housing costs and affordability even as population data suggests the region is not experiencing a mass exodus. Joint Venture Silicon Valley's annual survey found 40% of respondents in Santa Clara County said they are likely to leave in the next few years, a decline from recent years when up to 57% of respondents were looking to move.

NO MAGICAL THINKING.

The Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada (EDAWN), a non-profit that recruits companies to do business and expand in the state, paid Boring Company $50,000 in October to draw up conceptual designs and conduct a feasibility report for a new transportation alternative to the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center, the mega-business complex that houses Tesla's Gigafactory, according to a copy of the study invoice, which was obtained by Fortune via a Freedom of Information Act Request.

Since X's users started using Grok to undress women and children using deepfake images, I have been waiting for what I assumed would be inevitable: X getting booted from Apple's and Google's app stores. The fact that it hasn't happened yet tells me something serious about Silicon Valley's leadership: Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are spineless cowards who are terrified of Elon Musk.

For more than a decade now, Ethereum has offered the tantalizing promise of a global computer, available to anyone, that can be used to create decentralized alternatives to Big Tech's data-gobbling monopolies. The blockchain popularized smart contracts, and has been a springboard for thousands of projects backed by billions of dollars. It has also spawned legions of mostly fly-by-night imitators.

Koi offers endpoint software security and boasts that it can "Secure anything with an 'Install' button." Koi was founded by three members of the IDF's 8200 Intelligence Corps who claim it took them 30 minutes to create and publish an extension that could bypass most security environments, including those at large enterprises. Born from that was Koi, which they say "scans, governs, and monitors self-provisioned enterprise software at scale."

As of mid-December, only Nvidia and Alphabet are beating the S&P 500 this year. The rest of the Magnificent Seven are trailing the benchmark. That surprised even seasoned investors. Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) underperforming was not shocking, but Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) lagging the index caught many people off guard given its solid earnings and strong AI narrative. Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META), Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), and Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) have also struggled on a relative basis.

Hannah has played a defining role in shaping how people understand OpenAI and the work we do,

"When I was at Facebook, the top engineers were like, 'If you had a LinkedIn account, people would be wondering if you're job hunting,' he said. Novati said these engineers don't need to publicly job hunt because of tech's extensive recruiting arm, which he called the 'secrets of the industry.' 'There are very senior, very highly paid recruiters that work at the top companies who have very strong long-term social relationships with a lot of top engineers,' he said."

"I can see a point in time in the future when it matters as the only way to do it," Tan responded, before saying, "We are not quite there yet."

In September, OpenAI launched a way for users to generate a digital likeness of themselves they could use to create personalized deepfake videos. This is one of the core features in Sora, OpenAI's app for sharing AI videos inside a TikTok-style feed. The self-deepfaking feature was called "cameo," and with that standout feature, Sora quickly rose to the top of Apple's iOS download charts.