Silicon Valley AI trends you won't find on X

What was discussed

Oh Jae-kyung, EF's country manager for Korea, took the mic first. The obvious question was why a 60-year-old Swedish education company would turn up at an AI community event. He said EF is genuinely wrestling with whether people will still travel abroad to learn a language in an era when AI handles all the translating and interpreting. The point he left the room with was a clear one: language now starts everyone from the same line, and speaking some English is no longer a competitive edge but a tool for meeting someone and opening up a new opportunity.

Teddy Cross's own story is an unusual one. He grew up homeschooled in a small town in Tennessee, reading Wikipedia and science fiction, and at fourteen a game he built went viral on X and hit number one on Hacker News. That changed everything. A cold email from a Silicon Valley CEO followed (it was actually a message on GitHub), and at fifteen he flew out to Silicon Valley on his own. Only years later did he find out his parents had quietly done their own due diligence to make sure the man wasn't a kidnapper.

Playco was founded with Zynga co-founder Justin Waldron, Michael Carter, who invented WebSockets, and Takeshi Otsuka, who had built a business in Japan. They started in Tokyo, the second-largest gaming market after the US and the gateway to Asia. It was a path that ran from Tennessee to Silicon Valley and then back across the Pacific to Korea. He now spends 70% of his time in Korea, and said that although the internet makes it feel like everyone is globally connected, in practice living somewhere makes you more local, not less. Follow the signals you trust most on Twitter, blogs and podcasts, he said, and they will take you a long way.

Hiring, he said, has changed completely in the last six months. Nobody writes code by hand anymore, so the coding interview is dead, and so is the hands-off style of management. The share of an engineer's time actually spent coding has shrunk to something very small; the time goes into defining the product, writing specs, talking to customers, shipping and testing. So he is not looking for people who only code, but for people who can build a thing end to end, people who, in the end, have product taste. He also expects the first solo-founder unicorn to arrive soon.

The only place where AI has soaked into the atmosphere itself is Silicon Valley, he said, calling it a bubble, and an AI-native organization starts by asking itself every morning how it can become more AI-native. He pushed back on the idea that burning more tokens makes you more of a pro. A leaderboard for "burning tokens while getting nothing done" is a terrible idea, he said. The interesting part was that for all the things he uses AI for, he never uses it for writing. It is a question of authenticity, and because writing is the highest-fidelity way a human being expresses who they are.

AGI might turn out to be consciousness, but what it definitely is, he said, is self-improvement. Solve long-term memory and long-term learning, and self-improvement follows. What surprises him is that most people don't realize this is coming: the people in this room, he said, are the top 5% who are passionate about AI. In the breakout sessions that followed, groups traded notes on the AI trends they are watching and how they gather and internalize that information. The conversation kept returning to how quickly the work is shifting from prompt to context to harness engineering, and to a shared conclusion: in the end the answers are out in the field, offline.