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Hard Tech means nontrivial problems in all varieties, but Altman is particularly "excited about AI (both general AI and narrow AI applied to specific industries, which seems like the most obvious win in all of startups right now), biotech, and energy."

(edit: okay, okay, maybe the article isn't clear.)

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I didn't find it to be clear, otherwise I wouldn't have asked.

SV has its own jargon, and not being from SV, I think it's fair to want to clarify what is meant by a capitalized phrase like "Hard Tech" in case there is a deeper meaning known to those inside SV.

Fair enough. But I don't think "Hard Tech" is being used as SV jargon here. The first paragraph defines what is meant by "hard technology" mainly in the negative -- critics who say "SV isn't doing hard technology", for whatever value of "hard technology" they mean.

If the article was clear, it would have replaced "hard" with "difficult." Hard is ambiguous, especially when talking about technology.

Yes. My reading of the headline was "hard" in the sense of "hardware" because hardware tends to require larger investments and more time--and it's often much harder to advance to a viable point incrementally. To be sure, these characteristics also mean that hardware tends to be more difficult than many types of software but the terms don't mean the same thing.

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