Silicon Valley Notes I came to Silicon Valley because of an old aspiration connected to the Simons Institute. I expected to think about research, people, and future directions. I did not expect the trip to bring back old memories. For a while, I was again that younger version of myself in the theory community, admiring the beauty of the field while quietly learning how much academic genealogy mattered. Some people seemed to inherit legitimacy before they had to prove anything. Some of us had to prove ourselves again and again, and still felt outside the room. Leaving theory was intellectually risky, but emotionally necessary. In hindsight, it may have saved my mental health. Silicon Valley carries a different kind of intensity. It is brilliant, fast, and full of ambition. It also makes the moral cost of abundance very visible. When an organization can raise extraordinary amounts of money, scale can become a habit of mind. More compute. More data. More people. More experiments. Bigger models will, of course, often look better than smaller ones. But brute force is not the same as wisdom. Every large run burns energy, infrastructure, and human labor. Every dollar spent comes from somewhere, from someone’s work, someone’s trust, someone’s belief in a future being built. So the question is not only whether the result is better. The question is whether the resources were used responsibly. Did abundance make us more imaginative, or less careful? Did we approach the true ceiling of what could be achieved, or did we mistake spending for thinking? I had a similar worry when thinking about the younger generation growing up with powerful AI. We joke that students no longer need to struggle as much. Drafts come faster. Code comes faster. Answers arrive before the mind has fully wrestled with the question. In the short run, this looks like efficiency. In the long run, I worry about the quiet loss of depth. If young people skip too many stages of thinking, they may become easier to replace later — not because AI became infinitely capable, but because they were never given enough time to become hard to replace. This trip also changed how I think about “industry.” The usual phrase is the gap between academia and industry. That gap is real. But the gap between giant tech companies and startups may be just as striking. In startups, I felt hunger. People are fighting for knowledge, for survival, for a future that is still uncertain. The energy is raw. The questions are close to the ground. In large companies, I saw extraordinary talent, but often inside narrow boxes. People optimize their own area, their own metric, their own KPI. The system does not always ask them to care about the whole picture, and over time, perhaps many no longer need to. I left with mixed feelings, which is probably the right way to leave Silicon Valley. The trip reopened old wounds, sharpened old questions, and gave me a clearer view of the real problems ahead. It reminded me that intelligence is not only about scale, and progress is not only about speed. It is also about responsibility, taste, courage, and the willingness to think when thinking is no longer required. I learned a lot. I saw more clearly. I am ready to go.