Let the record show that AI started here, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That’s right, not in Silicon Valley, California. Seventy years ago, big thinkers like Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon, and John McCarthy were navigating the labyrinthine corridors under the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s famous Great Dome. They were among those who coined the term artificial intelligence in 1956 for a gathering that took place at Dartmouth, where McCarthy had taught before moving to MIT. At the time, their endeavors were academic esoterica noticed by few, and nobody much cared when McCarthy, the true “father of AI,” moved to Stanford in the 1960s, where he would have an illustrious career but remain obscure compared with McCarthys like Joe and Jenny.
So it’s not without a little envy that greater Boston is watching AI companies from the San Francisco Bay Area grab all the attention—and money. OpenAI buying famed Apple designer Jony Ive’s startup for $6.5 billion? Anthropic valued at more than $60 billion? Nvidia the first company ever to be worth $4 trillion?
We’ve seen this picture before. Back when the Computer Museum was still in Boston—it opened in 1979 and closed in 1999—it held the Computer Bowl, a trivia contest between East Coast and West Coast tech luminaries. It was broadcast live on a PBS show, The Computer Chronicles. The competitions were intense, with nerdy trash talk and, for the winning team, bragging rights.
But as the dot-com era exploded in the late 1990s, West Coast tech became so culturally dominant that the trivia game wasn’t much of an event anymore. Maybe the Boston Davids could take down the Silicon Valley Goliaths when it came to arcane knowledge, but the Left Coast companies were keeping score with market caps, and it was no contest. It’s no coincidence that the museum’s historical collection reemerged in Silicon Valley, at the Computer History Museum, around the turn of the 21st century.
We’ve seen a similar trajectory with AI. Our media envy aside, though, Boston is, quite frankly, thankful.
This article appears in Issue 33 of Alta Journal.
SUBSCRIBE
The view from here is that the West Coast has done the hard work of creating the building blocks of AI—the chips, the large language models, the cloud and data-center infrastructure—and now our entrepreneurs will go after the real money that comes with figuring out how AI will be used.
The pursuit of these riches is taking place along the Red Line, the subway that connects MIT, Harvard, and downtown Boston. If there’s a heart to Boston AI, it is at the Cambridge Innovation Center, a stone’s throw from the Kendall Square T stop, near MIT. Among the center’s tenants is C10 Labs, which launched a couple of years ago to create a seed fund and incubator for applied-AI startups. Patricia Geli, C10’s cofounder, managing partner, and chief operating officer, tells me that for all the attention and money lavished on the OpenAIs of the world, “the applied-AI layer is going to be much, much bigger. The next wave of companies will probably be trillion-dollar companies, and those are already being built, for sure.”
Take Fortuna-Insights as an example. The Boston-based firm used West Coast AI to build an arbitration tool—an AI judge—which it calls Arbitrus.ai. The tool’s initial market is real estate, and its first customers are in, wait for it, the state of California, where tenant-landlord disputes are legendary. Fortuna’s cofounder and CEO, Kimo Gandall, knows something about this problem. “I’m a SoCal native,” he tells me, and his brother lives in San Francisco. But Gandall’s not interested in moving back to California, he says, because the best opportunities for his company’s growth and profitability can be found by staying here.
As at other Boston AI startups, cash flow is king at Fortuna. This is far different from the situation on the West Coast. There, a company like OpenAI will be able to lose billions almost indefinitely, as long as it keeps growing (Amazon followed a similar decade-plus path to profits). Gandall tells me that “the California vibe is move as fast as possible and break things. The Boston vibe is revenue, revenue, revenue. And, make sure it works first, before you release it.”
Another “boring” Boston startup? How about Tomorrow.io? It applies AI to weather prediction in a clever way. Our top AI startups are building AI widgets to boost emotional intelligence for phone professionals or to diagnose health problems more efficiently. All very practical.
There are plenty of startups applying AI to the gigantic and lucrative healthcare market. One AI generalist I know who left Silicon Valley was dismayed by the number of biomedical AI startups here. He notes that he ended up finding a job in the Boston arm of a Silicon Valley startup.
And yes, there are some unabashedly cool companies here, those that aren’t just trying to dig a better ditch. Liquid has an approach to large language models that eliminates the hallucination problem—the tendency of AIs to make up stuff. We’re already wringing our hands about whether it will be the next wunder-company to break our hearts and decamp for Silicon Valley. Then we’ll start to moan about being just a source of brains for California companies bent on changing the world. But isn’t solving real problems for real people its own reward? It just feels, well, more real.•
Michael F. Fitzgerald has covered tech in San Francisco and the Boston area, where he now lives. Most recently, he was the editor in chief of Harvard Public Health magazine.
