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. Jasmine Sun: The way that AI progresses is in these fits and starts, and it's going to diffuse into our society quickly, but also incrementally. And I don't really want to wait around until that moment that AGI shows up and we can all agree on it...
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