In a series of articles, The Times examined the changes transforming Silicon Valley and how A.I. is reshaping the epicenter of the tech industry.
The Insider’s Guide to San Francisco’s A.I. Boom
There is one obvious reason that the tech industry’s ground zero for big ideas has moved north from Silicon Valley to San Francisco: OpenAI, the company that created the ChatGPT chatbot that started the A.I. craze, has its offices in a neighborhood that people in the tech industry have started calling the Arena. Anthropic, a rival A.I. start-up founded by former OpenAI researchers, is also in San Francisco. And many of the Silicon Valley investors who put money into start-ups have moved up the highway into the city. San Francisco officials, stung by offices that emptied during the pandemic, companies that left town (temporarily, it turned out) and warnings (generally overstated) that the city was on the ropes, have mostly welcomed the newcomers. And there is a sense that the city, led by its new mayor, Daniel Lurie, is ready to turn the page on its pandemic-era woes, even if many housing and drug problems persist. “It used to be that you built your company in Palo Alto. Investors loved it because there were no distractions,” said Steven Pham, the head of media for Y Combinator, the famed Bay Area start-up incubator. “Now all the founders want to live in the city. It’s where their friends are. It’s where the action is.” Here is a cheat sheet to where the tech industry’s young A.I. builders are living, working and playing in San Francisco.
The young intellects of the A.I. boom cannot be accused of false modesty. Hayes Valley, a central neighborhood just a few blocks from the gilded dome of City Hall, has been coined “Cerebral Valley” by tech insiders. A.I. developers and aspiring founders have — much to the surprise of longtime residents — made a home here. The neighborhood started to gentrify when an old highway offramp was replaced by a boulevard and a park that now frequently features artwork from Burning Man and talk of artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., and venture funding. Hayes Valley mixes historic Victorians and new high rises with $10 scoops of ice cream, blocks of low-income housing and stores with names like Fig & Thistle and Brass Tacks. And some tech founders have converted the neighborhood’s colorful houses to “hacker houses,” where start-up employees can work together during the day and host parties at night. While rumors of polyamorous living abound in these group-home situations, there is little doubt that the main focus is A.I. — building A.I., improving the world with A.I. and then saving the world from the A.I. that they build. Unlike swankier tech gatherings in Silicon Valley, Hayes Valley parties run on venture capital money that flows directly through the alcohol section of the nearby Trader Joe’s. “It’s clusters of the poorest-dressed millionaires around,” said Rene Turcios, a longtime attendee of the city’s hackathon circuit.
Swarming to San Francisco’s A.I. Boom: a New Crop of 20-Something CEOs
Brendan Foody had just finished his sophomore year at Georgetown University in 2023 when he dropped out to jump into the artificial intelligence fray in San Francisco. Karun Kaushik dropped out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that year to move to California after constructing an A.I. tool in his dorm room. And Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, who was traveling the world after high school, had the same idea in 2022. Now Mr. Foody, 22, Mr. Kaushik, 21, and Mr. Carmichael-Jack, 23, are each running A.I. start-ups within a 30-minute walk of one another in San Francisco. They have raised millions of dollars for their businesses and are supervising dozens of employees. They all have a dream that their companies will make it big. “When ChatGPT came out, it was so clear to me that this is obviously going to be a paradigm shift,” said Mr. Carmichael-Jack, the chief executive of Artisan, which makes an A.I. sales assistant and has raised more than $35 million in funding. “I knew I wanted to be involved in that.” The entrepreneurs are part of a fast-growing cohort of chief executives in their 20s who have flocked to San Francisco’s A.I. boom. Among others, there are also Scott Wu, 28, of Cognition AI, which makes a software coding assistant; Michael Truell, 24, of Cursor, which sells an A.I. code editor; and Roy Lee, 21, of Cluely, an A.I. software start-up. Perhaps the most prominent is Alexandr Wang, 28, who led the start-up Scale AI before Meta tapped him in June to run its new superintelligence lab. Their growing ranks have injected a dose of youthful élan to the A.I. frenzy, which has been dominated by longtime tech giants like Google and Nvidia and decade-old start-ups like OpenAI. Many of the entrepreneurs know one another from college or start-up incubators like Y Combinator. Work is often at the center of their lives — founders have to grind, after all — but they also host Ping-Pong nights, play poker together and meet up at networking events in the city. Venture capitalists are adding to the new blood with intensive start-up programs geared to high school and college students. It’s part of a well-worn pattern in which droves of young hopefuls are drawn to the nation’s tech capital by a promising technology, much as 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg and his friends did in the mid-2000s when they showed up in Silicon Valley with Facebook. Mr. Zuckerberg, now 41, famously dropped out of Harvard. “When you have these big technology waves, the whole chessboard changes and everything is up for grabs,” said Saam Motamedi, an investor at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners. Greylock’s San Francisco office recently hosted four 19-year-olds who are working on a “stealth” artificial intelligence start-up, Mr. Motamedi said, though the teenagers have since moved into their own space. Other California news
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