Late last month, a group of unknown South Korean researchers claimed to have found one of science’s holy grails — a material capable of conducting electricity without losing any energy that was stable at room temperature. Grainy videos of a small floating rock — one of the signature signs that a material may have superconducting properties — ricocheted around the internet.

A hubbub immediately erupted in Silicon Valley, where investors, tech executives and entrepreneurs — still hyping artificial intelligence — were enthralled with the idea that the potential breakthrough could become the first revolutionary leap forward in tech in years. A so-called room-temperature superconductor could make possible sci-fi-like ideas such as levitating trains, as well as more practical ones related to perfectly efficient energy storage.

The topic was so hot that the leaders of influential tech start-up incubator Y Combinator sent out a request to graduates of their program asking whether anyone had experience in materials science, according to a person familiar with the private forum, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private discussions. The post triggered hundreds of replies debating whether the South Korean discovery was legitimate or not.

Already, many scientists believe it was a false alarm, and the material, known as LK-99, might just be a type of magnet, though studies are ongoing. But the episode revealed the intense appetite in Silicon Valley for finding the next big thing after years of hand-wringing that the tech world has lost its ability to come up with big, world-changing innovations, instead channeling all its money and energy into building new variations of social media apps and business software.

“The market right now is very much in this shoot first, think later mind-set,” said Bryan Offutt, a venture capitalist at Index Ventures. “If you’re wrong no one will remember, but if you’re right you’re forward thinking.”

Silicon Valley’s boom and bust cycles have been rolling for decades. The dot-com crash of the early 2000s wiped out a swath of companies that had tried to capitalize on hype around the early internet, but also set the stage for the next wave of tech investment. Since then, innovations such as cloud storage and the smartphone have allowed thousands of start-ups to thrive, shifted much of society onto the internet and made Big Tech companies like Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft into some of the most powerful organizations in history.

But many tech leaders are nervous that the current focus on consumer and business software has led to stagnation. A decade ago, investors prophesied that self-driving cars would take over the roads by the mid-2020s — but they are still firmly in the testing phase, despite billions of dollars of investment. Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology have had multiple hype cycles of their own, but have yet to fundamentally change any industry, besides crime and money laundering. Tech meant to help mitigate climate change, like carbon capture and storage, has lagged without major advances in years.

Meanwhile, Big Tech companies used their huge cash hoards to snap up smaller competitors, with antitrust regulators only recently beginning to clamp down on consolidation. Over the last year, as higher interest rates have cut into the amount of venture capital and slowing growth has caused companies to pull back spending, a massive wave of layoffs has swept the industry, and companies like Google that previously said they’d invest some of their profits in big, risky ideas have turned away from such “moonshots.”