Does everybody in Seattle hate AI?
That’s one of many shocking inquiries to come up this week in response to a viral weblog put up penned by Jonathon Prepared, a former Microsoft engineer who just lately left the tech large to pursue his personal startup.
Within the put up, Prepared describes exhibiting off his AI-powered mapping mission, Wanderfugl, to engineers all over the world. In all places from Tokyo to San Francisco, persons are curious. In Seattle, “prompt hostility the second they heard ‘AI,’” he mentioned.
“Convey up AI in a Seattle espresso store now and folks react such as you’re advocating asbestos,” he wrote.
The offender, Prepared argues, is the Large Tech AI expertise — particularly, Microsoft’s. Primarily based on conversations with former colleagues and his personal time on the firm, he describes a office the place AI grew to become the one career-safe territory amid widespread layoffs, and everybody was pressured to make use of Copilot instruments that had been typically worse than doing the work manually.
The outcome, Prepared says, is a type of realized helplessness: sensible folks coming to consider that AI is each pointless and past their attain.
His put up drew a whole bunch of feedback on Hacker Information and different responses on LinkedIn. Some felt he hit the nail on the pinnacle. Trey Causey, former head of AI ethics at Certainly, mentioned he might relate, recalling that he would keep away from volunteering the “AI” a part of his job title in conversations with Seattle locals. He speculated town may be the epicenter of anti-AI sentiment amongst main U.S. tech hubs.
However others mentioned the piece paints with too broad a brush. Seattle tech vet Marcelo Calbucci argues the divide isn’t geographic however cultural — between burned-out Large Tech staff and energized founders. He pointed to layoffs that doubled workloads whilst AI demand elevated, creating stress ranges past easy burnout.
“In the event you hang around with founders and traders in Seattle, the vitality is totally completely different,” Calbucci wrote.
Seattle enterprise capitalist Chris DeVore was extra dismissive, calling Prepared’s put up “clickbait-y” and criticizing what he noticed as a conflation of the experiences of Large Tech particular person contributors with Seattle’s startup ecosystem.
That dovetails with GeekWire’s current story about “a story of two Seattles within the age of AI”: a company metropolis shell-shocked by huge job cuts, and a startup metropolis brimming with pleasure about new instruments.
Ryan Brush, a director at Salesforce, put forth an intriguing principle: that any anti-AI sentiment in Seattle will be traced to town’s “undercurrent of anti-authority pondering that goes means again,” from grunge music to the WTO protests.
“Seattle has a protracted reminiscence for being skeptical of techniques that centralize energy and extract from people,” Brush commented. “And loads of what we see with AI in the present day (the dimensions of knowledge assortment, how concentrated it’s in just a few massive corporations) may land in another way right here than it does elsewhere.”
Prepared ends his put up by concluding that Seattle nonetheless has world-class expertise — however in contrast to San Francisco, it has misplaced the conviction that it could change the world.
In our story earlier this yr — Can Seattle personal the AI period? — we requested traders and founders to weigh town’s startup ecosystem potential. Many neighborhood leaders shared optimism, partially as a result of density of engineering expertise that’s essential to constructing AI-native corporations.
However, as we later reported, Seattle lacks famous person AI startups which might be simple to search out within the Bay Space — regardless of being residence to hyperscalers corresponding to Microsoft and Amazon, in addition to world-class analysis establishments (College of Washington; Allen Institute for AI) and substantial Silicon Valley outposts.
Is it as a result of Seattle “hates AI”? That looks like a little bit of a stretch. However this week’s dialogue is actually one other reminder of the evolving interaction between Seattle’s tech companies, expertise, and startup exercise within the AI period.
Associated: Seattle is poised for enormous AI innovation impression — however might use extra entrepreneurial vibes
