Silicon Valley keeps building for itself and calling it innovation
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A growing backlash is forcing Silicon Valley to reevaluate its investment priorities, with many questioning whether recent trends like NFTs, the metaverse, and generative AI have truly benefited ordinary people. Venture investors are now shifting towards 'hard tech' and infrastructure projects with tangible utility.
Silicon Valley is facing a reckoning over its recent investment priorities, with many questioning whether trends like NFTs, the metaverse, and generative AI have truly benefited ordinary people. Meta's metaverse push, for example, resulted in $13.7 billion in losses in a single quarter, with user adoption failing to justify the hype. Similarly, NFTs saw a speculative frenzy peak in 2021 before collapsing. Generative AI, while showing real infrastructure demand, has seen early users abandon novel tools due to hallucinations and poor workflow integration. As a result, venture investors are increasingly signaling a preference for 'hard tech', defense, manufacturing, and energy infrastructure. This shift is driven by a desire for projects with tangible utility and short feedback loops between product and user. The industry is drawing parallels with the dot-com collapse, where infrastructure companies like Cisco and Oracle outlasted speculative ventures.
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