A Coming-Out Party for Generative A.I., Silicon Valley's New Craze

In Silicon Valley, crypto and the metaverse are out. That much became clear Monday night at the San Francisco Exploratorium, where Stability AI, the start-up behind the popular Stable Diffusion image-generating algorithm, gave a party that felt a lot like a return to prepandemic exuberance. The event -- which lured tech luminaries including the Google co-founder Sergey Brin, the AngelList founder Naval Ravikant and the venture capitalist Ron Conway out of their Zoom rooms -- was billed as a launch party for Stability AI and a celebration of the company's recent $101 million fund-raising round, which reportedly valued the company at $1 billion. But it doubled as a coming-out bash for the entire field of generative A.I. -- the wonky umbrella term for A.I. that doesn't just analyze existing data but creates new text, images, videos, code snippets and more. It's been a banner year, in particular, for generative A.I. apps that turn text prompts into images -- which, unlike NFTs or virtual reality metaverses, actually have the numbers to justify the hype they've received.