Within a year, the traders had quit the hedge-fund business and bought several thousand G.P.U.s, which they ran from Venturo’s grandfather’s garage, in New Jersey. After the cryptocurrency market crashed in 2018, CoreWeave acquired more microchips from insolvent miners. Before long, the firm had built a platform that allowed outside customers to access the G.P.U.s. Then, in 2022, Venturo came upon Stable Diffusion, an image-generation A.I. He fed the A.I. descriptions of different scenes, and it returned accurate, beautiful illustrations. “This is going to enrapture the entire world,” Venturo remembers thinking.journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter