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\n The Inventors Residency, a hacker house in Pacific Heights, in August.
\n Photo: Laura Morton for New York Magazine\n <\/p>\n
This article was featured in One Great Story<\/a>, New York\u2019s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here<\/a> to get it nightly.<\/p>\n The subject is an axle around which a certain kind of mind interminably spins. It turns out that I have more than a few acquaintances who have become AI People, but when I ask them about it, they launch into a theory they have or send me a paper they\u2019ve written, and the abstraction of artificial intelligence layered onto the abstraction of money feels like listening to someone explain the rules of a card game no one wants to play. I am in San Francisco trying to get away from that kind of mind. The kids I spend a little time with speak with disdain of B2B software and with respect for hard problems. They are accustomed to taking off their shoes and placing them in a pile in the entryway of every living space and every workspace, the division between the two having been completely effaced. They are hiring, or their AI agents are hiring, or they were themselves hired by a computer program simulating human intelligence. They are 18 and 23 and 28, and they arrived last month, or last week, or earlier today. They are raising or have raised or are writing code on which to raise; the percentage chance the tools they are creating will destroy humanity is known, with some ironic distance, as P(doom).<\/p>\n Someone tells me I absolutely have to meet a \u201csupercool\u201d guy named Patrick Santiago, and when we talk for the first time Pat is down to hang pretty much immediately, so I walk over to Market Street, a few blocks from the Tenderloin, a part of town in which another woman advises me to walk \u201cwith purpose\u201d if I walk at all. Pat is transforming a few dozen rooms in a one-star hotel with frightening reviews (\u201cVery unclean. Health and safety concerns\u201d) into \u201ckind of a summer-camp experience\u201d for aspiring founders, mostly 20-somethings with no interest in drawing a paycheck from big tech. He calls his hacker house Accelr8, and he started it, broke, as a way of \u201craising in the AI boom.\u201d The first residents, who rent rooms Pat has leased from the hotel, rode up the creaky elevator just this past June. Pat\u2019s wearing sweatpants, Adidas slides without socks, a Patagonia fleece he occasionally tugs over his mouth as he vapes, and a square piece of plastic on a string called a Buddi, an AI device that records and summarizes all of his conversations.<\/p>\n \u201cUnfortunately, all of the standard rooms are like this,\u201d he tells me, standing in a single room with a window that opens directly onto a white brick wall. \u201cThe upgraded rooms you can get like a street view, but that\u2019s honestly worse in some cases.\u201d<\/p>\n This town is full of zoomers who are always pitching to a phantom venture capitalist standing behind me, but in Pat this impulse is absent, which is why I keep returning to him. \u201cThere\u2019s not even like really good margins on it as a business,\u201d he says when I ask about Accelr8\u2019s finances. \u201cIt\u2019s like my needs are pretty much met as far as like food and like a room and then I get to meet all these cool people. It\u2019s all social capital.\u201d<\/p>\n Pat keeps bringing up \u201cProfessor Dumpster\u201d and I don\u2019t really know what he\u2019s talking about but he eventually leads me to a former college dean with a room in the building. The two met a few years ago on 40 barren acres in Wyoming, where they were part of a group attempting to establish a community \u201ccollectively owned by 5,000 people on the ethereum blockchain.\u201d In the current S.F. scene full of vibecoding 19-year-olds, Pat, who is 28, self-identifies as an \u201cunc.\u201d \u201cWhat the fuck does that make me?\u201d asks Professor Dumpster, who is in his 50s and wears black-framed glasses and lives in one of the rooms overlooking the Tenderloin when he isn\u2019t living in his design-award-winning home in Marfa.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d he says. \u201cIt feels to me like maybe San Francisco was in the late 1840s. These people are coming to town to find the gold and build their kingdom. And they\u2019re young and hungry and they have nowhere to sleep and nowhere to go. And you\u2019ve got this guy Pat: You could stay in my Hacker Hotel.\u201d<\/p>\n Dumpster, who also goes by Jeff Wilson, got his name by living in a (clean) dumpster for a year, as a kind of social experiment, when he was an assistant professor at a university in Texas. He spent time in San Francisco during the dot-com boom among a cohort that came in older, more likely to have gone to college and held a job or two, less likely to casually register the possibility of total self-annihilation. Hacker houses are not new. This feels different. \u201cThere are moments where I\u2019ve observed behavior like this,\u201d he says, \u201clike at a boys\u2019 Christian church camp or something where they\u2019re all hyped up on Jesus. But in this case \u2026 they\u2019re creating the God.\u201d<\/p>\n \n Patrick Santiago leads a \u201cfounders hike\u201d at Lands End in Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Every gold-rush story is a tale of a ticking clock. To spend time with Pat is to watch him glide lackadaisically, as if inside a gentle dream no one else is having, among roboticists and engineers and undergraduates for whom time is rigorously tracked. \u201cWeirdly ascetic\u201d is how Pat\u2019s co-founder, Dan, describes Accelr8\u2019s residents. When Pat and Dan threw their kickoff party for the house, they stocked two fridges with $500 worth of beer and White Claw that went untouched. To future events, they brought only energy drinks and chicken.<\/p>\n \u201cConnect with someone who will 10x your trajectory through intros and fireside chats,\u201d reads the website for a network of houses, \u201cliving the joy of human connection is what really makes The Residency \u2764.\u201d<\/p>\n Hacker house is a term that borrows cachet from but in no way denotes the anarchist ethos of an Anonymous-type collective trying to tear down technocracy. The most desirable houses cater to relentlessly optimistic valedictorians working 16-hour days in the hope that they will someday soon be part of a better, cooler, potentially more ethical technocracy. It is at the Residency\u2019s location in Pacific Heights, a clean and bright house with big windows and rainbow rugs and playfully distorted mirrors, that I meet Christine and Julia, direct and unpretentious 19-year-old Harvard roommates. They had spent most of the summer working on something about \u201cpost-grant-award compliance\u201d but Christine thought they should stop thinking about \u201cwhatever\u2019s hype right now\u201d and do something they care about, so they pivoted in July, \u201cinfiltrating 25 Chinese mom groups\u201d to explore Chinese mom \u201cbuy behavior.\u201d Now they\u2019re talking about \u201csynthetic groups\u201d and \u201chyperpersonas,\u201d which is to say they\u2019re still figuring it out. What\u2019s clear is that they feel better here than they did in Cambridge.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you go into Harvard, there\u2019s so many people that come in wanting to do cool things and then after one semester they\u2019re like, Oh, I\u2019m gonna do consulting,\u201d says Christine. She\u2019s sitting on a stool beside an unmade bed with headphones around her neck. \u201cIt\u2019s just kind of the goal of college right now,\u201d says Julia, \u201cwhich is so sad.\u201d Julia is a part-time DJ. She is wearing an off-the-shoulder sweatshirt and sitting next to her desk in front of a pink sticker that reads LAUNCH and a strip of black-and-white snapshots from a photo booth. Christine and Julia have only been here a few weeks but they share a certain S.F. tech chill, a kind of relaxed hyperfocus untouched by chatty New York neuroticism. They want to talk openly about self-branding with social media, stuff that would be seen as \u201ccringey\u201d at Harvard but is miles below the cringe threshold in this house. \u201cI don\u2019t know if other times in my life will have such an AI boom,\u201d says Julia. They were amazed by how much founders could raise \u201cpre-seen, pre-product.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe talk a lot about momentum,\u201d says Christine. They\u2019re going to start raising money in two weeks. \u201cThe amount raised from that will be enough probably to get my mom to be like okay with maybe a gap year,\u201d says Julia. \u201cWe both have immigrant Chinese moms.\u201d She laughs. \u201cLike our moms are very similar.\u201d<\/p>\n When I ask about nightlife in these places, I never get very far.<\/p>\n \u201cDidn\u2019t you do like a robot thing?\u201d Christine asks Julia.<\/p>\n \u201cYeah,\u201d Julia says. \u201cThey have these robots in a room, and they have them fight.\u201d<\/p>\n \n Julia and Christine, seated, in their room at the Inventors Residency. \n Pally, an AI relationship-management platform, hosts a party at the company\u2019s house in Miraloma. Christine and Julia had been to a party at the company house for Pally, which describes itself as an \u201cAI relationship-management platform.\u201d They had been to many parties full of men, one of which smelled so bad that they left immediately. They\u2019re thinking about doing some social media where they put on video-recording glasses and record a party from the perspective of a woman.<\/p>\n Christine\u2019s P(doom) is \u201chonestly \u2026 5 to 15 percent,\u201d but for now she and a close friend share a light-filled room and their days are filled with stimulating people, like the guy building a \u201crizz master app,\u201d who \u201cactually gives the most insightful advice,\u201d and Carsten, a Swiss German 27-year-old who was designing AI-involved sandals but recently pivoted to drug testing. \u201cDo you understand Carsten\u2019s?\u201d Christine asks Julia. \u201cHe\u2019s insane. He\u2019s so cool. He basically wants to do like virtual cell modeling \u2026 like for drug testing.\u201d Downstairs, in the shared kitchen next to an Instapot, I meet Carsten in his AI sandals. His P(doom) is a slightly sunnier 5 to 10 percent, though he also thinks people should stop producing apocalyptic scenarios that eventually become training data for the AI itself. He enjoys talking to Christine and Julia so much he sometimes brings a timer into their room and limits himself to five minutes of human connection before returning to his start-up.<\/p>\n Jonathan is, like many, many people in this town, a graduate of Canada\u2019s University of Waterloo. A few years ago, he was offered an internship with Google. He turned it down. \u201cI was like, Oh, I can\u2019t work at Google. If I work at Google, I\u2019ll become a wage slave forever.\u201d He now sees that view as immature. A lot of what Jonathan felt a few years ago now feels like the interiority of another person; he\u2019s embarrassed that I have read his diaristic blog posts about life after college: \u201cLike, why do you feel so strongly that Oh, you have to drop out and Oh, you can\u2019t work with big tech. It\u2019s because you need to justify your existence. Like there\u2019s so many ways of living life. You could be a founder. You could not be a founder. It shouldn\u2019t be a big deal.\u201d<\/p>\n He is in fact a founder, and it is a big deal, which is why below our feet, in the basement, a scanner is drawing information from someone\u2019s brain through a series of wires into a stack of computers plugged into the house\u2019s EV charger. A few years back, Jonathan, a child of Chinese immigrants to Canada, was waking up every day on a mattress in a garage, putting in his time in a hacker house. Now he has \u201ca bed frame, table, chair, everything\u201d in an Inner Richmond rowhouse where, though he would not put it this way, his roommates all work for him. \u201cWe try to keep it pretty healthy,\u201d he says, admitting they sometimes work until 10 p.m. \u201cBut it\u2019s not that bad because you finish and you eat food and you exercise and you hang out with friends and then, like, that\u2019s your day. I try to keep it balanced. You have to like be very thoughtful. You\u2019re discovering the nature of things for the first time.\u201d<\/p>\n Jonathan is eating noodles in a clean kitchen (\u201cWe keep everything organized and proper\u201d), wearing khakis, plastic slide sandals with green socks, and a plaid fleece. Humans are \u201cvery bad at being self-aware,\u201d he says between bites. \u201cLike, What are the five emotions you feel right now and what percentage? The whole idea of our work is to use deep algorithms and computational neuro to, uh, understand state of mind from brain scans alone.\u201d<\/p>\n We head downstairs to a dark basement attached to a garage. A slight, long-haired man, a paid test subject solicited through Craigslist, sits before a computer screen, wearing a white cap that looks like a medieval linen coif threaded with wires. The screen flashes images \u2014 basil, a blazer, Parmesan cheese. With unsettling clarity, the computer will be able to resurrect the image from electrical signals in the subject\u2019s brain. A subject considers a picture of jelly beans. AI offers a picture of similarly colored beads. A subject looks at a red station wagon; AI presents a red sedan. Until very recently, most people thought the data produced by EEGs, an 80-year-old technology, was noisy garbage. \u201cThey just didn\u2019t understand the power of large language models,\u201d Jonathan says. He is 24 years old.<\/p>\n \n A paid test subject prepares for a data-collection session at the headquarters of Alljoined. Reading minds is what AI engineers mean when they talk about hard problems. Eventually, the tech will advance to interpret \u201cevoked states.\u201d \u201cSo we start with, you know, discrete smaller tasks like emotion, like positive, negative, maybe now ten, 20 emotions. And then we add more dimensionality so that eventually we can go into full sort of inner monologue,\u201d a world of superior self-knowledge wherein we sift through our own memory banks rather than selectively recall events through a haze of misperception. \u201cAnd,\u201d he says, \u201cwe do it all in-house.\u201d<\/p>\n Doing it all in-house looks like this: a server rack with LED-lit fans in the garage next to some exercise equipment and some bicycle helmets. Jonathan and his housemates built the rig themselves. \u201cJust asking ChatGPT basically. You know, you can just ask and then order the parts you need and you learn and you debug.\u201d<\/p>\n A scientist in socks adjusts some power cords. The subject gets up and takes off the cap. His hair is wet with gel, but there is a sink in the corner of the basement with a bottle of Ouai shampoo for cleaning off. The technology, says Jonathan, is a \u201chumanizing layer\u201d between us and AI, \u201ca way for us to bridge that gap\u201d between machine and brain. If his company doesn\u2019t move forward, Jonathan points out, someone else will, someone perhaps more malicious. \u201cYou can\u2019t change the outcome if you sit passively.\u201d<\/p>\n The company is called Alljoined; what is being joined are human neurons and artificial intelligence. Jonathan\u2019s P(doom) is a bracing 35 percent, but \u201cproper integration with BCI,\u201d as in brain-computer interface, would bring it down 25 points, which is a gentle way of saying that he\u2019s trying to save humanity from his neighbors.<\/p>\n The scene really is a scene, which is to say it has solved, for a little while, the problem of isolation. The ways in which people seek out one another are particular and limited, often contractual, occasionally involving humanoid fighting robots. You want a founding engineer. You want a co-founder. You want someone with whom to enjoy rotisserie chicken and Red Bull, someone who will 10x your trajectory through intros and fireside chats. You likely do not want a long-term romantic partnership or perhaps even a short-term one. \u201cEverybody a little bit competing,\u201d a 33-year old Ukrainian named Lidiya tells me at the kitchen table of an all-woman hacker house that calls itself Oasis Collective. \u201cIt makes people very protective and anxious,\u201d says Juliet, Oasis\u2019s founder, \u201cabout who they\u2019re gonna have in their lives, the distractions they could possibly have.\u201d Juliet is wearing hoop earrings and a necklace and careful makeup, holding her Chihuahua in her lap. \u201cAnd this applies to who you\u2019re gonna choose to live with, who you\u2019re gonna choose to date. Humans are messy. Relationships are messy.\u201d<\/p>\n No one is dating, but everyone is hiring. At a hackathon in a SoMa warehouse, a cheerful young human recruiter tells me that she was recruited by an AI recruiter seven weeks ago. She has hired someone every week since. Her new boss is Flo, who is French and 33 and hosting the 200-person event going down around us. He\u2019s next to a half-dozen of his employees in black T-shirts, but his most notorious employee was fired a couple weeks back.<\/p>\n \u201cHoly shit,\u201d Flo wrote on X the day the cascade began. \u201cWe hired this guy a week ago.\u201d In his rush to fill bodies for his \u201cno-code AI platform\u201d he had brought on an exceptional Mumbai-based coder named Soham. Soham was 26 but looked younger. He had charmed CEOs all over the city, crushed coding tests, and gotten himself hired at more than ten start-ups, each one presumably thinking he was working only for them.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/1c4ad2dae316fc0fd15574e1d046513611-sized-20250810-NYMAG-AIFLOPHOUSE-0083edi.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Laura Morton for New York Magazine\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/2f8c48aab3813f870f7e7e2f80c3fc0d62-sized-20250816-NYMAG-AIFLOPHOUSE-0447edi.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Laura Morton for New York Magazine\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/5d69d980b27dee2ef9de95ec5df627bd41-sized-20250814-NYMAG-AIFLOPHOUSE-1381edi.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Laura Morton for New York Magazine\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/5d7f7faf79dac786ca0bc8afc5011816b1-sized-20250812-NYMAG-AIFLOPHOUSE-0658edi.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Laura Morton for New York Magazine\n <\/p>\n
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