For the past two years, most of the tech sector has been in contraction mode. We saw layoffs across the board, a shift to core business priorities, and a general skepticism toward anything that wasn’t directly monetizable. R&D dried up. “Moonshots” became punchlines. People got cautious—and reasonably so.

But something has shifted. And it’s happening quietly, almost in the background.

We’re seeing the return of novelty work.

Not just in startups. In big tech.

Here’s what I think is going on:

Large tech companies are re-hiring. Not indiscriminately, and not to rebuild the same layers they just cut. They’re hiring selectively—for people who can help them explore.

Because something new has opened up.

Tools like GPT-4o (o3) have changed the map. What once required months of ramp-up—studying a domain, running prototypes, testing hypotheses—can now happen in a week. If you apply the model aggressively, especially with novelty-directed prompts, it becomes not just a productivity tool, but a discovery engine. It collapses time between an idea and its plausibility.

That compression matters. It creates strategic urgency.

Big tech is feeling that urgency. When entirely new opportunity surfaces—new UX paradigms, new AI-native workflows, new consumer behaviors—it’s not enough to optimize existing product lines. You have to get there first. And for that, you need people who know how to work in undefined spaces. Who aren’t afraid of ambiguity. Who can fuse ideas laterally and ship just enough to prove what’s next.

In a strange twist, the very same companies that downsized their frontier R&D teams a year ago are now quietly building them back—because the frontier itself just moved.

This isn’t just about hiring.

We’re also seeing capital return to exploratory work. AI-native founders are raising on narrative again—on conviction, not just revenue. And they’re doing it because the time-to-test has shortened. They can explore four product directions in a month and know which one has a market. That kind of leverage pulls capital back in.

So yes, the “tech recession” is over. But it’s not a cycle reset in the old sense. It’s not simply capital returning—it’s imagination returning.

What comes next will be built by those who are comfortable exploring fast, failing cheaply, and synthesizing across boundaries.

If that’s you—this is your time.