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In Silicon Valley, the AI boom means two things at once. There is excitement about this new technology, and there's also concern about that excitement running out. NPR tech correspondent John Ruwitch went to San Francisco Tech Week to take the pulse.
JOHN RUWITCH, BYLINE: Tech Week is a citywide festival of sorts. Hundreds of events spread around the city, bring together startup founders, investors and tech workers. They range from lectures by experts to...
(SOUNDBITE OF WATER SPLASHING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Oh, it feels great.
RUWITCH: ...Morning cold plunges. It's where my day starts, around dawn with a handful of people gathered for a dip in the San Francisco Bay.
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RUWITCH: Laur Laanemets came from Estonia to network during Tech Week. He leads the cold plungers in a Nordic chant.
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Chanting in non-English language).
LAUR LAANEMETS: You can see, like, the craziness, like, has sort of accumulated here in San Francisco, right?
RUWITCH: Money is flooding into AI with company valuations soaring, but huge questions seem to loom over everything.
LAANEMETS: It's very sort of hot and, like, exciting and scary at the same time, right? Like, a lot of this doesn't make sense.
RUWITCH: It's not clear how many of these new AI companies will turn profits. There's also a growing litany of cases of AI bots going rogue. When the swim's over, I head across town to a venture capital firm called Superset to watch a pitch competition.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Hello, everyone. Thank you for coming to this weird event. Why are we doing this (ph)?
RUWITCH: This is how Silicon Valley startups convince investors to fund their businesses. Only this pitch meeting is for fun, and they have to do it in a half an hour. One of the prizes is for most unhinged. A group considered a business to install devices to clear up the fog that regularly enshrouds the city's most iconic landmark.
UNIDENTIFIED FOUNDER: So, like, the fog, which usually is there near the Golden Gate Bridge - so we want to put heaters there, you know, to basically dispel it on command.
RUWITCH: That one might not work, and I wasn't able to catch up with that founder afterward to get his name. But Peter Day, a general partner at Superset, says the energy in Silicon Valley is invigorating.
PETER DAY: It's not felt like this for a while. What's possible has changed dramatically. So we can solve problems that was - were unsolvable a few years ago.
RUWITCH: I ask him about all the predictions that AI could threaten humanity. He thinks they're overblown. A lot of people at Tech Week did. But Day says economic disruption is coming. AI is already shaking up the job market. A few years ago, a degree in computer science seemed like a slam dunk for employability. Now it can be hard to find an entry-level job, so people are starting companies instead.
DAY: One of the sad truths about why so many people are trying to be entrepreneurs and seeing that as a viable career path is so many other career paths are no longer accessible to them.
RUWITCH: The pitches are done, and the winner of Most Fundable Business Plan was an app called Sell Yourself.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Congratulations, team.
RUWITCH: It lets you sell your online data to companies so you get a cut. Olivia Heindel's team built a demo using AI.
OLIVIA HEINDEL: Yeah. I think AI is obviously the future of everything. With Claude these days, we spun up that website in 20 minutes.
RUWITCH: Across town, Drew Glover agrees about AI. He's an investor.
DREW GLOVER: Every tech business that's being created right now is an AI business.
RUWITCH: The big risk he sees is the possibility that this is all a bubble, like the dot-com bust around the year 2000 when speculative investment in internet companies dried up.
GLOVER: There are companies out there that just got valued at $5 billion that have zero revenue and have a team of 14 people, and they basically have to spend the next decade of their life trying to catch that valuation.
RUWITCH: He says it's a new gold rush with AI, but nobody quite knows how much the gold is worth yet.
John Ruwitch, NPR News, San Francisco.
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