Silicon Valley runs on hype cycles, and the AI boom is generating a new one—part gold rush, part ideology, and part quasi-religious devotion to building an alien intelligence.

On this week’s “Galaxy Brain,” Charlie Warzel explores the culture of this boom with the writer Jasmine Sun, who’s been chronicling San Francisco’s AI scene. Sun describes what this moment feels like on the ground, including a subculture of massive salaries, and a weird pride in leaning into tech’s strangeness. Together, Warzel and Sun unpack two major factions shaping the industry: the AI “doomers,” and the accelerationists. The conversation also traces Silicon Valley’s rightward drift—the “founder mode” backlash against regulation and employee activism and the rise of “Trump style” provocation-first tech marketing. Finally, Sun and Warzel address the jagged reality of today’s models, which are brilliant at some tasks and weak at others. 

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