Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Tuesday, October 28th. I'm Belle Lynn for the Wall Street Journal.

San Francisco is back, or at least it's on its way. We look at how the city at the center of the AI boom is coming back from the brink of a doom loop. Plus,

with so many mega deals being struck between OpenAI, Nvidia, Microsoft, and others,

circularity has become one of the buzziest words in the AI vernacular. We dig into the best

and worst-case scenarios for these deals.

But first, not too long ago, it seemed like San Francisco was emptying out, as locals decamped for suburbs and cheaper locales.

Yet, if you look at the city now, things are pretty different.

Our tech reporter Katie Bindley tells us how San Francisco is bouncing back.

So, Katie, as you write in your story, San Francisco is showing signs of a rebound.

Crime rates have dropped, the homeless tent encampments have shrunk and rents are up.

These are all good signs, but let's go back in time a little bit. What was the

reputation of the city prior to this recent turnaround? Yeah, so basically what happened is you

had the pandemic hit. People started working from home. The city has, you know, a high

concentration of knowledge workers, people who work in tech, people who could do their jobs from home.

And of course, tech was one of the earliest adopters of remote work.

And so you just had way fewer people going into the office,

fewer people just walking around the streets and everything.

Rents certainly declined for a while. The commercial

real estate market suffered quite a bit. And then you also had certain types of crime went up at the same

time that this was going on and a lot of visible homelessness and drug use. And we technically weren't

in a doom loop because there's this economic definition of that.

The economists told me back at the time we were not meeting yet, but people had concerns that

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