The latest artificial intelligence model from OpenAI is a technological leap forward
and an aesthetic jump backward, going by its promotional video.
The clip begins with grainy footage from 1979 of a Massachusetts
Institute of Technology researcher testing voice command software.
Cut to the present.
The Eames chair and projector screen remain,
but now workers assemble presentations and fiddle with contracts via dictation as they pace around the brown carpet.
Another chills out by building and playing a rocket ship game.
The whole thing is, in a word, retro.
A retro revolution is underway in Silicon Valley.
Outside Elon Musk's diner in Los Angeles, a homage to 1950s Americana,
can be spotted at least a few Cybertrucks, Tesla's beefed-up version of the 1981 DeLorean.
Palmer Luckey founded not just Anderil, a defence firm named after the sword from J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth,
but also Mod Retro, which makes replicas of video game consoles from the 1990s.
Andreessen Horowitz, the world's largest venture capital firm, has rebranded itself in the Art Deco style.
Anyone who's anyone has an opinion on the fallen beauty of the world.
The boss of Stripe, a giant payments firm, has given out grants to projects in search of new aesthetics,
but many more techies think the answers lie in the past.
Some dismissal this as the midlife crisis of an industry whose power has outgrown its casual look.
Much has been written about Mark Zuckerberg's tough-guy transformation, but he still works at One Hacker Way.