For me it's not just AI. The industry just doesn't feel the same anymore. Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon - I've been in this industry since the 80s, but things really seemed to change, or I finally noticed it, around 2010 or so. It seemed like everything we were building wasn't to help people, it was to extract data from people and generally just harass people into buying shit.
We transformed society through email, the web, mobile, and so on. But now we're recording everything your car does and delivering ads on refrigerators. It just doesn't feel the same anymore.
I agree on ~2010 at least in San Francisco, that's when it all started to turn toward social media and VC hype.
a16z, Sequoia, Accel - people like that started showing up. (a16z invested in the first startup I worked at, they were only founded 1 year prior in 2009).
The Facebook movie, Justin Timberlake, I mean Sean Parker, I mean Justin Timberlake. Ashton Kutcher? Wtf
It got out of control, but at least the cash was flowing.
2016 is the year I use for "when it all fell apart".
The young guns always point to 2020s as the "overhiring boom" etc. but they have no idea what a frenzy it was in ~2010. If you knew basic HTML and jQuery you could literally get a $1M Series A in the right circles of people. It was like they could not find enough web designers and would do anything to get one.
Fun times. But of course, that could not have lasted.
We transformed society through email, the web, mobile, and so on. But now we're recording everything your car does and delivering ads on refrigerators. It just doesn't feel the same anymore.