‘Silicon Valley’ Season 6 Episode 6 sees PiperNet almost fail, jeopardizing RussFest but PiedPiper coders reengineer AI to save it
This article contains spoilers for ‘Silicon Valley’ Season 6 Episode 6
The penultimate episode of ‘Silicon Valley’ Season 6 and the whole series started with things going downhill for Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch) and his company PiedPiper from the get-go. In a bid to save himself and his company from an impending ethics investigation, in the previous episode, Richard agreed to help Russ Hanneman (Chris Diamantopoulos) organize his magnum opus: RussFest (visibly a cross between Burning Man and Fyre Festival). And that’s now the least of his problems.
In a meeting with Russ and AT&T (that was all set to partner up with PiedPiper to launch its Hawaii project), things went badly, even if one ignored Russ overenthusiastically pointing out the three commas in the RussFest poster. After the meeting, Richard was told that not only had AT&T backed out of the deal, they added insult to injury by saying they had gone with YaoNet instead, a company that has been PiedPiper’s rival for some time now.
The problems did not end with that. Bertram Gilfoyle (Martin Starr) used his A. I. -- Son of Anton -- to debug the systems. The A. I., however, proceeded to delete programs altogether, an unexpected setback that only made Richard more fidgety.
“It’s possible that Son of Anton thought the best way to get rid of all the bugs was to get rid of all the software, which is technically and statistically correct,” explained Gilfoyle. “But artificial neural nets are sort of a black box, so we’ll never know.”
The show then fast-forwarded to RussFest. While Russ reached new levels of neurotic -- he kept changing costumes, utterly knocked out by the sheer amount of choice he had -- PiperNet’s functions and services kept deteriorating.
PiperNet was supposed to be the only thing keeping the fest going in the middle of nowhere. They even suspected YaoNet was sabotaging them -- both Laurie Bream (Suzanne Cryer) and Gwart (Nandini Bapat) were present at the fest. But the horrible truth was delivered to Richard by Laurie herself.
She said she had come on an espionage mission and not a sabotage one. She told Richard that just like YaoNet, PiperNet would not scale and that they had no hopes of this working out. A thoroughly frustrated Richard threw his laptop on the ground and jumped on it till it broke, while shouting, “Six f**king years we wasted building this worthless piece of shit!”
When all seemed almost lost, things took the all-too-familiar ‘Silicon Valley’ turn. Richard took Gilfoyle’s computer and reengineered Son of Anton to create another A. I. that learned how to optimize itself.
But it turned out it was actually Dinesh Chugtai’s (Kumail Nanjiani’s) laptop and he had messed around with Son of Anton. In a way, it was all three coders’ efforts that somehow made the system work. An exhilarated Jared Dunn (Zach Woods) said, “You are like the Three Musketeers of code, but you are all D’Artagnan!”
The system also somehow made Russ’ already larger-than-life hologram at the fest reach gigantic proportions -- so big that it was visible from a plane on which a rep from AT&T was seated. The show ended with him receiving Richard’s text that said, “We should talk.”
New episodes of ‘Silicon Valley’ premiere Sundays at 10 p.m. on HBO.