Galaxy Brain What Do the People Building AI Believe?
33 snips
Feb 27, 2026 
Jasmine Sun, a writer who tracks Bay Area tech culture and AI, offers a ground-level look at San Francisco’s AI gold rush. She describes massive salaries, hype-fueled subcultures, and competing camps of doomers and accelerationists. They explore Silicon Valley’s rightward political shift, provocative marketing tactics, and AI’s jagged strengths and weaknesses.
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San Francisco's AI Gold Rush
- AI culture in 2024 blends quasi-religious belief and massive financial incentive, creating a gold-rush fervor among builders in San Francisco.
- Jasmine Sun observes developers treating AI as almost divine, fueling huge salaries, rapid funding, and a proud embrace of tech strangeness.
Two Dominant AI Factions
- The AI scene is split between 'doomers' who fear existential risk and 'accelerationists' who prioritize rapid progress and competition.
- Doomers include influential thinkers like Eliezer Yudkowsky and now exert cultural and political influence around safety.
Doomer Models Clash With Jagged Reality
- Doomer narratives have shifted as real-world model behavior revealed slower, jagged progress rather than an immediate apocalypse.
- Jasmine notes models are brilliant in narrow tasks but weak elsewhere, challenging binary extinction timelines.
