Live from SF, it’s Tech Week — Info

Hello and welcome to the weekend.

It was the best of times and the worst of times.

At least that’s how it feels now in Dickensian San Francisco. Fentanyl dealers hang out in every alley, while AI companies have stores on every street.

Just kidding, but seriously, it’s been rough around here. More than 17 of the 35 startups listed in The Information’s new Generative AI database were born in San Francisco. Together, these companies have raised more than $13 billion (!) to explore tech areas that barely existed just a few years ago. Meanwhile, even Market Street’s Old Navy, which has been a downtown staple since the dotcom days, can’t survive in the current economic climate.

Over the past few days, the atmosphere of contrasts has been striking as Andreessen Horowitz’s SF Tech Week takes place in town. It was great to see the 200+ events explode across the city. People were in high spirits, as reporter Erin Wu and photographer Laura Morton discovered. Business cards (and hot wings) were flying. The sci-fi death spiral seemed to have stalled. But a glance at Friday afternoon’s headline, “Mayor Breed SF Opens Joint Command Center to Fight Field Drug Dealing,” revealed a more complicated story.

These contrasts reminded me of AI company CEOs like Adam D’Angelo warning that AI could spell the end of humanity (more on that below). So are we growing or are we declining? Apparently, folks, we’re doing both.

Fourteen years after the Quora CEO founded the user-driven Q&A site, D’Angelo pinned his hopes on a hot new AI app, Poe. This service allows users to easily and quickly work with many large language models at once. D’Angelo told Ariel that in Web 2.0 he hopes to become an AI-era app like Netscape.

Thousands of techies gathered this week at the 200-event SF Tech Week grand event to try to answer the following questions: “Wait, isn’t every week tech week in San Francisco?” Erin and Laura hiked Celebrities Valley and reported from the other side.

In a months-long commune in Montenegro assembled by the founder of Ethereum, techno-futurists have found a safe haven to debate, dance, and ponder its meaning. Margaux spoke with Grimes, Stable Diffusion founder Emad Mostak, and a bunch of Zuzalans (as they called themselves) who partyed alongside various players.

Listening: Audio Tour of Video Games
“Great,” said Simon Parkin, ending a conversation with Josh Wardle, the creator of Wordle, on the six-month-old podcast My Perfect Console. “The ending turned out to be a little more philosophical than I expected.” I’ve digressed into emotional digging. Parkin, who is responsible for games at The New Yorker, is an agile interviewer, has deep knowledge of the field, and applies a high-touch approach to a medium still widely considered lowbrow. Guests include video game makers such as Valve’s Erik Wolpaw and enthusiasts such as investigative reporter and Hollywood scion Ronan Farrow. Parkin asks guests to choose five of his games that mean the most to them, the titles that form the “perfect console.” One of Mr. Farrow’s picks was his 1990s PC game, ‘Myst’, which was themed around “colonialism and daddy issues.” “So, of course, I love that game,” he said. –Abe

Read: 1% Fairy Godfather
Want to attend the MET Gala? Would you like to book a private hospital wing? Can you renew your visa with one text? Ray Flemings is your man. According to Motherboard’s Maxwell Strachan, he is “one of the leading fixers for the world’s elite.” To hire Flemings, a client must have her net worth of $30 million or more and be prepared to spend at least $1 million a year on maintaining a “lifestyle.” Flemings calls his own network “Miria,” which has morphed from a private concierge service to a full-fledged technology startup. Last year, he developed his Myria branded app through his Y Combinator and got an investment from an accelerator. Flemings likes to describe capitalism as “almost a sacred idea” and he breathlessly believes that “the richest people in the world should have more fun and spend more money.” profess. We believe it is actually for the greater good. ’ It’s a good thing, at least for some people. –Annie

Spotlight: Play-to-earn downturn
Remember the heyday of cryptocurrency when ventures like Andressine Horowitz and Paradigm touted “play to earn” games as the very job of the future? As this CoinGecko graphic shows. Then everything turned into a nightmare. Last year, Step’N, a blockchain game that pays users to exercise, gave players an average of $40 per day. Now you are lucky to have a nickel. The crash was particularly devastating for people in countries like the Philippines, where players were led to believe games like Axie Infinity would help them feed their families. In practice, economics only worked when crypto token prices were high. Still, some investors cling to the promise of “earning”. On the same day that CoinGecko announced its findings, Seven Seven Six founder Alexis Ohanian said: tweeted Within the next five years, “the vast majority of gamers will stop playing games unless they are properly evaluated at that time.” It’s very clear what drives Ohanian’s optimism. His company invested in Yuga Labs’ ‘Otherside’, one of his most famous Play-to-Earn games. May he never wake up to find that his investment is worth less than his nickel. — Margaux