Keen On

Former New York Times reporter John Markoff has been writing about Silicon Valley for almost a half century. In December 1993 the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist wrote one of the earliest articles about the World Wide Web, referring to it as a "map to the buried treasures of the Information Age." So where are we now in the history of tech, I asked Markoff. Is the AI boom just one more Silicon Valley cycle of irrational exuberance? And how do contemporary tech titans like Sam Altman and Elon Musk compare with Steve Jobs, who Markoff covered for many years.John Markoff is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. He has reported on Silicon Valley for more than four decades and wrote for The New York Times’ science and technology beat for 28 years, where he was widely regarded as the paper’s star technology reporter. He is the author of five books about the technology industry including his upcoming book Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (on sale in March 2022). For decades Markoff has chronicled how tec