AI workers suddenly become the most popular kids in San Francisco as industry parties explode

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Builders and founders from across the country gathered at the chic Cerebral Valley office to socialize and enjoy the usual tech industry perks of free booze and canapés. Minutes later, The Standard was asked to showcase someone’s product, while four others submitted AI projects ranging from fanfiction to virtual reality.

A slew of parties, industry happy hours and hackathons began springing up in the Bay Area last summer as advances in artificial intelligence kick-started startup culture again. Local and international media have picked up on the growing excitement, pushing the narrative that San Francisco may slowly but surely return to its tech-thriving days.

Now the AI ​​bubble is bigger than ever, and techies are turning their lifestyle into one big online game. At an AI-focused social party on Tuesday, The Standard found people who said they had attended at least a dozen AI-themed parties in the past two weeks. Some spoke of liking founders from underrepresented backgrounds, while others named their favorite hacker houses.

“San Francisco is back”

AI Twitter is now buzzing mixer event lists through the bay area. Tech folks say it only really took off in the last few months, after the public release of ChatGPT.

“People are joking and creating memes about San Francisco being back, but honestly, I’ve never seen it more alive,” said Dennis Xu, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence platform Mem. “It would be a mistake not to at least partially attribute this to the rise of the AI ​​wave.”

The reason for all the madness? It’s simple: people are interested in creating things and tend to do it personally, in a community. Numerous sci-fi hackathons—often overlapping on the same days—gathered hundreds of programmers to network and simply create new products; and live incubators allowed the founders to focus solely on their craft without distractions.

Simply put, nerds are nerds again. Michelle Feng, self-proclaimed “community girl” of the tech scenecollects and publishes viral tweets about community building, social events, hackathons and more.

“San Francisco has always been focused on building and building cool things and actually connecting with people intellectually.” Fang said.

This is a far cry from 2020 and 2021, when the tech community fled San Francisco en masse and migrated to Miami and New York, often with baroque twitter themes explaining your reasoning. But the local founders say the personal, social aspect of today’s AI scene is vital to its success and is indicative of an old-school, healthier “builder culture” that has brought much-needed social cohesion and networking opportunities. to industry.

Sugar Mohr, Stripe’s product manager who tweets under the pseudonym @theaievangelist, moved from Berlin to San Francisco about 18 months ago to be closer to AI activities. The Israeli native has been involved in artificial intelligence for ten years, but OpenAI’s work has drawn him to the San Francisco Bay Area.

“It was clear that everything to do with AI would happen here in San Francisco,” Mohr said. “Here people think about it every day, they are constantly making something. This is where you meet people who are trending on Twitter in real life.”

Mohr, like Fang, is one of the main creators of the Bay Area community: Mor maintains a frequently updated Google public doc listing happy hours, meetings, and AI hackathons similar to the Twitter threads Fang shares. These community-driven founders are the industry’s glue, and they do it out of love for the game.

Boom and bust?

It’s hard to watch the wave of hype around generative AI and not see the echoes of the cryptocurrency gold rush that reached its climax amid the collapse of FTX.

Mem’s Xu, one of the first startups to receive funding from the OpenAI Startup Fund, admitted that he’s starting to feel a bit tired of the AI ​​hype and its relentless pace.

“I think I’ve been invited to more events in the last three months than in the last four or five years. There is too much going on in my opinion,” Xu said. Watching former cryptohumans rush into AI space, Xu wonders if many people are entering the scene to actually build or just chat.

“We can learn a lot from cryptography and Web3,” Fang said. “There was a huge inflationary period where everyone was excited and eager to work in crypto, but then there were several major scandals and problems – the industry had a dark period. But I do think that the reason why the hype and popularity of AI has been so high is simply because of the density of the number of people who are here and create AI.”

It also remains an open question how much room there is for startups and small fish in a space where industry giants like Google and Microsoft are vying for dominance.

Yitong Zhang, a former Coinbase employee who builds a cryptocurrency startup, said he has always been somewhat skeptical of overarching narratives about the death and rebirth of San Francisco.

Many of the events he has seen are run by companies looking for talent or venture capitalists trying to get deals flowing. In response, Zhang is trying to launch his own series of regular happy hour events that aren’t tied to a specific industry or company, but driven by a shared passion for technology.

“When the excitement around generative AI subsides, the proponents will move on to other things. Those who stay will build strong companies,” Zhang said. “I think there will always be a little boom and bust in new technologies, and that’s okay.”

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