There used to be significant alignment between engineers, founders and certain VCs: lots of excitement around building software that genuinely made things better/easier/cheaper. Each group naturally wanted a different thing out of this arrangement but each camp was on the same page.

Now I feel like everything is more top-down. The tech sector feels less like market capitalism and more like something being centrally planned: we all must chase trends that come from various industry thought-leaders. And it all must be done a very specific way (this in particular is why Chinese companies are likely going to disrupt the AI market: they’re free from this burden)