FREDDIE DE BOER: Who Says Another Google is Coming? “Why has AI hype been so overwhelming? I’ve argued that, at the bottom of this strange moment, there’s a broad desire to be freed from the mundane. AI sounds like something that might relieve us from the burden of living in boring reality, and that’s an attractive notion even for people living generally contented lives. . . . Another big driver of AI hype, though, is the recent investment environment. . . . Tech is a very mature field now, and despite startup mythology, what tech startups are trying to do now is often capital-intensive. The free money spigot has been turned off. There’s no law of nature that says another Google or Facebook is going to appear out of the mist and offer you an opportunity for pre-IPO investment. And yet a quick perusal of the ‘hockey stick growth’ search term on Twitter reveals how many people are chasing this dream.”