In many ways, Stanford University is a monument to trillion-dollar success stories, with buildings named after Microsoft Corp.’s Bill Gates and Nvidia Corp.’s Jensen Huang. But as Bret Taylor leans back in his chair at an outdoor cafe just off the main quad, the chairman of OpenAI and co-founder of artificial intelligence startup Sierra Technologies Inc. is fixating on how those stories can suddenly go horribly wrong.
Studying computer science on this fabled California campus as a sophomore in 1999, Taylor lived through the euphoria of Web 1.0, when expensive Sun Microsystems workstations lined student labs and once-hot tech brands doled out snacks as a recruitment ploy. Soon after, the internet bubble burst, the free pizza and job offers vanishing alongside $5 trillion in market value. (Sun’s own market cap plummeted as much as 96%, and most kids these days can’t even name this previously dominant force in servers and software.) Taylor jokes that he and his cohort of Xennial coders double-majored in computer science and “the hype cycles of Silicon Valley.”