Matteo Wong writes:

On a Wednesday morning last month, I thought, just for a second, that AI was going to kill me. I had hailed a self-driving Waymo to bring me to a hacker house in Nob Hill, San Francisco. Just a few blocks from arrival, the car lurched toward the other lane—which was, thankfully, empty—and immediately jerked back.

That sense of peril felt right for the moment. As I stepped into the cab, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell was delivering a speech criticizing President Donald Trump’s economic policies, and in particular the administration’s sweeping on-again, off-again tariffs. A day earlier, the White House had claimed that Chinese goods would be subject to overall levies as high as 245 percent when accounting for preexisting tariffs, and the AI giant Nvidia’s stock had plummeted after the company reported that it expected to take a quarterly hit of more than $5 billion for selling to China. The global economy had been yanked in every direction, nonstop, for weeks. America’s tech industry—an engine of that system, so reliant on overseas labor and hardware—seemed like it would be in dire straits.

Yet within the hacker house—it was really a duplex—the turmoil could be forgotten. The living space, known as Accelr8, is a cohabitat for early-stage founders. Residents have come from around the world—Latvia, India, Japan, Italy, China—to live in one of more than a dozen rooms (“tiny,” an Accelr8 co-founder, Daniel Morgan, told me), many of which have tech-inspired names: the “Ada Lovelace Room,” the “Zuck Room,” the “GPT-5 Room.” Akshay Iyer, who was sitting on a couch when I walked in, had launched his AI start-up the day before; he markets it as a “code editor for people who don’t know how to code.” In the kitchen, a piece of paper reading WASH YOUR PANS OR SAM ALTMAN WILL GET YOU was printed above a photo of the OpenAI CEO declaring, in a speech bubble, that he eats children.

For a certain type of techie in the Bay Area, the most important economic upheaval of our time is the coming of ultrapowerful AI models. With the help of generative AI, “I can build a company myself in four days,” Morgan, who’d previously worked in sales and private equity, said. “That used to take six months with a team of 10.” The White House can do whatever it wants, but this technological revolution and all the venture capital wrapped up in it will continue apace. “However much Trump tweets, you better believe these companies are releasing models as fast,” Morgan said. Founders don’t fear tariffs: They fear that the next OpenAI model is going to kill their concept.

I heard this sentiment across conversations with dozens of software engineers, entrepreneurs, executives, and investors around the Bay Area. Sure, tariffs are stupid. Yes, democracy may be under threat. But: What matters far more is artificial general intelligence, or AGI, vaguely understood as software able to perform most human labor that can be done from a computer. Founders and engineers told me that with today’s AI products, many years of Ph.D. work would have been reduced to just one, and a day’s worth of coding could be done with a single prompt. Whether this is hyperbole may not matter—start-ups with “half-broken” AI products, Morgan said, are raising “epic” amounts of money. “We’re in the thick of the frothiest part of the bubble,” Amber Yang, an investor at the venture-capital firm CRV, told me.

There were also whispers about the stock market and the handful of high-profile tech figures who have criticized Trump’s economic policies. Yang told me that she had heard of investors advising start-ups to “take as much capital as you can right now, because we don’t know how the next few years will play out.” But around the Bay, the concerns I heard mostly positioned tariffs and stricter immigration enforcement as a rough patch, not a cataclysm. The industry’s AI growth would continue, tech insiders told me: It would speed through volatile stocks, collapsing commerce, a potential recession, and crises of democracy and the rule of law. Silicon Valley’s exceptionalism has left the rest of the country behind. [Continue reading…]