Chapter 1
Birth of the valley: From audio oscillators to silicon chips
Chapter 2
Designing the personal computer: Out of the labs and into homes
Chapter 3
The internet gold rush: Browsers, bubbles, and mobile apps
Chapter 4
The intelligence age: From social feeds to neural networks
Ch 4 · The intelligence age: From social feeds to neural networks
steve Instead of buying hardware, companies rented processing power from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft data centers to reach millions of users.
Quiz
Which e-commerce giant pioneered modern cloud computing by launching its Web Services (AWS) division in 2006?
Quiz
What major shift allowed tech startups to launch with very little capital by renting server power instead of buying hardware?
steve Alex Krizhevsky's neural network shifted Silicon Valley from garage workshops to AI labs.
Quiz
What was the name of the revolutionary neural network that won the 2012 ImageNet competition, sparking the modern AI boom?
Quiz
In which annual computer vision competition did AlexNet demonstrate its massive leap in image-recognition accuracy?
Fun Fact
Training in a bedroom: AlexNet, the neural network that launched the modern deep learning boom, was trained on two home video game graphics cards in a graduate student's bedroom.
Quiz
What type of computer hardware, originally designed for video games, did Nvidia adapt to power modern artificial intelligence?
Quiz
Released by Nvidia in 2006, what software tool allowed programmers to use graphics cards for general scientific computing?
Glossary
neural network (noun)
A computer system modeled on the human brain, designed to recognize patterns and process data. Silicon Valley shifted from social media feeds to these advanced architectures in the early 2020s.
A computer system modeled on the human brain, designed to recognize patterns and process data. Silicon Valley shifted from social media feeds to these advanced architectures in the early 2020s.
Quiz
Launched in late 2022, which conversational AI application became the fastest-growing consumer app in history at the time?
steve AI founders now crowd San Francisco's Mission District and South of Market, turning these urban neighborhoods into Cerebral Valley.
Quiz
Unlike the suburban campuses of Apple and Google, where is the modern generative AI boom primarily concentrated?