I watched Code Rush tens of times. That was my time, I just had my degree in Computer Science in Milan, Italy. Before Mosaic and then Netscape, the only way to get access to information was through an Ampex terminal using tools like Gopher and Veronica. Internet connection was rare and hard to get, and the first browser changed my life forever. Soon after, the first ISPs emerged, and in an instant, access to information became available, even from my 10,000-person town. Netscape is how I became aware of Silicon Valley, and it took me almost 15 years to get there. It has been a lot of fun and excitement; I knew something big was happening, but nobody believed me or even understood me. When Code Rush finally became available on YouTube, it was like being part of the pirate crew from my small town for the first time. I still watch it once a year. It changed everything.
This is an oral history interview with Ken Thompson, created in partnership by the Association for Computing Machinery and the Computer History Museum, in connection with his A.M. Turing Award in 1983.
Yes and no. Are AI companies overvalued? Yes. Will most of them crash and burn? Yes, they will. Are the words "intelligence" or "reasoning" misused? Absolutely. Nonetheless, nobody can deny that some of these tools are useful and have demonstrated they can generate revenue like no other tool, app, or device before. There is something different from the dot-com bubble; many barriers have come down since 2000. Everyone can be connected 24/7 for a few tens of dollars a month. People trust the internet as a medium to perform transactions and access data. The real bubble is in the private market valuations, especially in the pre-seed stage. Many young entrepreneurs don't understand that raising their first round at $30M, $50M, or even $100M post-money will put a heavy weight on their shoulders approaching the Series A. Raising a funding round is a promise you make to the market. Increasingly high expectations will burn many wanna be entrepreneurs whose contribution to make things better for everyone will be lost forever. I'm deeply convinced that the reality check for all those companies is the public market, and in today's world, you can't go public after 3-5 years if your initial valuation has been built on a 20-year-long promise. All the trillion-dollar companies we know today went public a few years after their creation: Apple, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, etc. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cursor are black swans, not evidence of the power law.