During the 2010s tech boom, Silicon Valley’s uniform was the hooded sweatshirt. Mark Zuckerberg caused a stir on Wall Street in 2012 when the young chief executive had the audacity to wear a hoodie to pitch investors during Facebook’s roadshow for its initial public offering. That was when paying $1bn for fledgling photo-sharing app Instagram seemed sensational.

These days, the twenty-something founders in San Francisco are wearing $2,000 Moncler vests. And a billion dollars, once the hallmark of a feted “unicorn”, has become the price of entry, not exit, for artificial intelligence start-ups. 

In recent months, several small teams of entrepreneurs and researchers exiting the likes of Google DeepMind and OpenAI have been able to walk into venture capital firms and demand upwards of $1bn to fund a new idea for a “frontier” AI model developer — and walk out with a clutch of offers, sometimes in a matter of days.