196 - Next Valley

One of the benefits of having a team currently distributed across 4 continents is that we can more easily attend conferences across all of them. My colleague and our CEO Frits will be attending London Tech Week this coming month starting from June 10^th^, which looks to have quite a bit going on with many stages. London Tech Week 2024

For those in the area or otherwise planning to attend it will be an opportunity to meet face-to-face with a core member of our team. I spent my time in London this time last year, so it is his turn now.

Creating the "next Silicon Valley" has become of popular goal among many countries in Europe, with France thus far successfully mirroring the worst aspects of SV VCs, as the UK mirrors the worst aspects of US governance. Whether or not any of those countries succeed has little or nothing to do with how they treat trivial technologies like LLMs, as it is deploying new kinds of technology that create such a hub, not deploying massive quantities of the same trash flooding the market.

The internet, browsers, search engines, social media platforms, video sharing, and the new kinds of hardware these things demanded are all examples of the kinds of new technology and capacities that can and often did create such hubs. Places can temporarily attract existing markets with major tax cuts and similar parasitic manipulations, but the US automobile industry and the "Rust Belt" tell the story of how those efforts crash and burn in the long run.

Right now, most places claiming they want to become the next Silicon Valley are just setting their sights on becoming the next "Rust Belt" of AI. Which location emerges as the tech hub of the next generation of technology, largely rendering Silicon Valley obsolete and "rusting out" real estate values there, will depend almost entirely on who invests in fundamentally viable technology.

If there were a single broadly competent and long-term thinker in SV's real estate sector then they'd make a large and immediate investment just to prevent all of their current assets from rusting out, but such an investor belongs more as a convenient plot device in works of fiction than the real world. The real world is reflected in far greater fidelity through a quote from Bernardo Kastrup:

"Technologists don't give a damn about what is true, technologists give a damn about what works and often what works is not true at all... all we need is an approximation, a narrative, a fiction that is convenient. In other words, a fiction that is such that nature behaves as though that fiction were right. Whether it's really right or not is irrelevant for technologies."

London Tech Week is sure to grant the stage to many works of pure fiction, but some who actually give a damn about what is true will at least be in attendance.