I'm actually kind of shocked to hear this question. The person I was responding to originally is probably just going for the childishly rebellious "I'm gonna say something contrarian to seem like a deep thinker!!!!", but you don't seem to be saying anything of the sort.
I would be extremely surprised if you hadn't heard of any of this stuff; I think the problem is rather that your definition of what innovation is may be arbitrarily and inappropriately defined with respect to the topic of conversation.
This has been a good few years for AI and there have been some impressive advances recently in voice recognition, computer vision, language understanding, core machine learning research, etc. The AI labs at Google and Facebook alone are an important part of this ecosystem. Silicon Valley has also been producing advancements in diagnostic nanotechnology, space exploration and travel, feasible and long-range electric cars, self-driving cars, power generation and distribution systems, manufacturing efficiency, etc. There's a thriving biotechnology startup scene. Then you get down to less "sexy" (but still very important) innovation in things like datacenter design, distributed systems, software-defined networking, network protocols (like SPDY), etc. Even softer stuff like the work being done on the economics of distribution, or the efficient delivery of compute cycles is seeing a lot of advancement in the last several years, and a lot of it is centered around here.
I fully expect a response from some commenter who hasn't been able to grasp what this conversation is about to claim that a lot of that isn't "true" innovation at the kind of low level one finds in academia, but that's missing the point. It begs the question of whether companies in SV are innovative by defining innovation in for-profit companies as more or less impossible (which is, of course, nonsense). Government-funded academia is an excellent vehicle for fundamental research, just as corporations are good vehicles for the next step in the chain (and occasionally fundamental research). The funny thing is that even if you move the goalposts by restricting yourself to academic advancements, both Stanford and Berkeley are world-class research universities and parts of the SV ecosystem.