2023-12-26 04:45:12
It’s a blue house, on Lily Street, in San Francisco (California), backed by a row of banyan trees. The alley ends with a mural – flowers in psychedelic colors, by Italian artist Pepe Gaka. In the urban patchwork that is the “city of forty-two hills”, Hayes Valley is an oasis of tranquility. Trendy boutiques, galleries, pottery studios. Cafés where you can enjoy “artisanal” donuts or “botanical” pastries. The neighborhood is a stone’s throw from Haight-Ashbury, the capital of flower power from the 1970s.
Calm is deceptive. Behind these Victorian houses lies a world in turmoil. If the phenomenon of artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the world of technology, Hayes Valley is the epicenter, with its community houses, hacker houses, where creators share their living and working space. In less than a year, the neighborhood took on the nickname “Cerebral Valley.” A reference “to the brilliant minds who came to settle there”explains Juliet Kelso, 32, one of the occupants of the blue house.
THE techies today are far removed from the programmers of the previous generation, that of the expansion of platforms. They lived in lofts with a view of the East Bay. They worked at “invent applications to order food”, as Gloria Felicia, 28, says with a hint of condescension. The creators of AI are convinced to participate in “the greatest revolution in the history of humanity”. At La Boulangerie, the French café that has become the meeting place for hackers and utopias, in the heart of Hayes Valley, they are seated, noise-canceling headphones on, under a vintage advertisement for Orangina. “AI people find inspiration in old housesadmire Juliet Kelso. The past meets the future. »
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“AI will save the world”
Artificial intelligence is the new gold rush. Investors are pouring their money into start-ups, as they did ten years ago on social networks: 21.4 billion dollars (23.6 million euros) between January and October, according to the specialist site PitchBook, compared to 5 .1 billion dollars in 2022. Listening to the veterans of Silicon Valley, the current fever is comparable to the beginnings of the Internet, at the end of the 1990s, to the invention of smartphones, which revolutionized the way of use computers following 2007.
Or that of the steam engine, as suggested by Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, on November 15, during the second AI summit organized by the Cerebral Valley AI group at the SFJazz Center in Hayes Valley. In 2012, influential investor Marc Andreessen heralded the era of digital expansion: “Software is going to eat the world. » In June, the oracle delivered its new mantra: “Artificial intelligence will save the world”he wrote on his blog.
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