One Peninsula community college student decided to do what apparently no one else had bothered to: actually document it. Over the past two months, they've been building The Valley of AI, a community-driven map and archive of every AI billboard and ad across the region. Some are slick. Some are bizarre. Some look like they were designed by the very AI they're advertising. Together, they paint a portrait of a region that has gone fully, unapologetically all-in on a single industry — again.

How dominant is the takeover? One Bay Area commuter counted billboards on a drive from SFO to Santa Rosa and found that 86% were AI ads. Eighty-six percent. As they put it, "Some were kind of hard to tell they were advertising AI. IMO it's kind of sad."

Sad might be one word. Revealing is another.

This is what happens when billions of dollars in VC funding need to justify themselves to the public — or at least to other VCs driving the same corridor. These billboards aren't really for consumers. Most people couldn't tell you what half these AI startups actually do. The ads are peacocking — expensive plumage designed to signal relevance in a gold rush where nobody's entirely sure who's finding gold and who's selling shovels to each other.

From a fiscal perspective, it's worth asking: how much of this ad spending is burning through investor money that will never generate returns? We've seen this movie before — with crypto, with Web3, with the first dotcom boom. The billboards go up, the logos look cool, and then one day they quietly come down and nobody remembers the company existed.

That's exactly why this archive matters. It's a time capsule of Bay Area excess in real-time. Years from now, we'll scroll through it and marvel at how many companies were competing to tell us they were "AI-powered" without explaining why we should care.

If you spot one in the wild, contribute a photo. Future historians — or at least future Dissent readers — will thank you.