Bloody oath
Australian founder Max Marchione’s ambitious health tech startup Superpower captures the new Silicon Valley mood: loud, brash and convinced AI will eat the world.
Max Marchione greets people with a hug. “Hugs only,” he says, as if it’s an HR policy and religious sacrament rolled into one.
Later, the twenty-something Aussie founder of health tech startup Superpower will also talk — cheerfully, calmly, openly — to our reporter Bronwen Clune about blood oaths, experimental peptide injections and a future in which medicine belongs to machines, with clinicians present largely because regulators rudely insist on a warm body in the loop.
You don’t have to buy any of that to recognise the mood it reflects. Even the most unapologetic cheerleader for the AI boom would concede that, beyond inflated share prices, sprawling data-centre buildouts and a tidal wave of AI slop, the technology has yet to percolate through the real economy in ways you can reliably point to.
There are tremors, certainly. But much of global business — including in Australia — remains stuck in the purgatory of wait and see.
