Techno-optimism is on full display at NY Tech Week

While New York’s city comptroller Mark Levine is sounding alarm bells that AI is coming for the city’s workforce, the venture capitalists funding that technology see something else entirely.They believe New York may be uniquely positioned to benefit from artificial intelligence since virtually every major industry has a home here.“A lot of the applications and real-world deployment of the technology — in media, fashion, finance, and healthcare — is going to happen in New York City,” says David Haber, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

While the foundational models and the hardware are still being built in San Francisco, Haber argues New York is becoming the applied AI capital — the place where the technology actually touches industries and reshapes how people work.The numbers back him up.New York’s tech sector is already growing eight times faster than every other industry in the city — and Haber believe the real surge hasn’t even started.“We’re still in the first inning,” he told me.

“We’re only at 1% penetration of the technology.” That is also part of the reason AI giants like OpenAI and ElevenLabs are opening posts in the city — to be near the concentration of industries, from healthcare to hedge funds, gives them something Silicon Valley can’t replicate.Haber’s bet is paying off.Moment, a wealth management AI company in Haber’s portfolio, is already working with financial giants — including Edward Jones, Hightower and LPL Financial — less than two years after launching.The city’s techno optimism has been on full display at NY Tech Week, which kicked off Monday and runs through Sunday.

The week-long event, presented by a16z, is expected to draw 40,000 attendees across 1,500 events with banks, law firms and consulting firms turning out alongside the startups — industries that are trying to embrace technology.That optimism runs directly counter to city comptroller Levine’s report last month that warned that AI po...