[mindcrime]

I'm going to guess that you might be surprised at the number of startups that actually do rely on some aspect of AI, if you were to dig deep enough. Even if they're not "an AI startup" lots of companies these days are using some sort of machine learning, data mining, collaborative filtering, etc. stuff, which are aspects of AI. Look at any company that's using a recommender system of some sort... that stuff is one element of AI.

Aside from that, I think it's just that hackers have always been fascinated with AI. And lot of what we know as "hacker culture" to this day, dates back to people and events that happened in the AI research group at MIT, decades ago[1].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_(programmer_subculture)#...