Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want

The Verge / 4/21/2026

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Key Points

The article is critical of how Silicon Valley tech insiders often get excited about niche discoveries that may not reflect what ordinary people actually want.
It describes an anecdote in which an acquaintance frames an “amazing discovery” about LLMs—such as language structure and meaning—suggesting these tools reveal insights into speakers.
The author pushes back on the idea that such findings should be treated as groundbreaking on the level of historical inventions like writing.
Overall, it argues that the industry’s focus on hype and technical cleverness has caused it to lose touch with mainstream needs and perspectives.

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One of the most mortifying things about knowing a lot of techies is listening to them tell me excitedly about some very important discovery that they believe they have made. Recently, I ran into an acquaintance of mine, who began talking my ear off about an amazing discovery he'd made with LLMs. Knowledge, it turns out, is structured into language! You could put one word into ChatGPT and it might understand what you wanted, or make up a word and see if it understood what you meant! These amazing new tools have revealed that the English corpus contains so much about its speakers!

He concluded that LLMs are a discovery on par with writing.

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Read the full story at The Verge.