A.I. creators brace for chaos

The center of the tech universe seems to believe that Trump’s tariff whiplash is nothing compared with what they see coming from AI.

Excerpt: 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."