SAN FRANCISCO - A year ago, the mood in Silicon Valley was dour. Big Tech stocks were falling, the cryptocurrency bubble had popped, and a wave of layoffs was beginning to sweep through the industry.Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post.
"The improvement in quality was much greater than expected," Dan Wang, a business professor at Columbia University who studies the tech industry, said of the emergence of generative AI. "That took folks by surprise and also released the imaginations of both existing entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs."
Companies are also putting money where their mouths are, and one of the biggest beneficiaries so far is Nvidia. "What can we say other than just 'Wow!'" C.J. Muse, an analyst with Evercore said in a client note. "We've simply never seen a beat like this … ever." Big companies and start-ups alike are "clamoring" to buy Nvidia's products, Muse said.
Suvrat Bhooshan, a former AI researcher at Meta and founder and CEO of Gan.ai, a start-up that lets people automatically create customized videos of themselves, just raised $5.25 million from investors including Sequoia Capital and Emergent Ventures. The deal came together fast, with some investors giving him full-fledged term sheets just a week after initial introductions, Bhooshan said.