Currently, Jamestown brings food trucks to Levi’s Plaza four days a week, runs a shuttle service to BART to connect the neighborhood to downtown, and funds programming like a rooftop Blue Angels watch party and outdoor concerts.
“We initially got a bunch of confused looks when we told people we were coming here,” said Prady Modukuru, CEO of Sync Labs, which moved into a fully furnished, 5,400-square-foot office at Waterfront Plaza last year. “But we’ve found [the North Waterfront] is actually the best place to work on deep AI research. It’s beautiful, peaceful, and quiet. You can’t help but feel inspired.”
Modukuru’s AI company — which allows editors to translate audio into various languages — went viral in 2023 for producing a video of Mark Zuckerberg and Lex Fridman talking about Elon Musk in Hindi. Although Sync Labs’ customers are mostly in Los Angeles and New York, Modukuru said the proximity to engineering talent and venture capital funding makes it critical to be based in San Francisco.
“If you want to push the frontier, you have to be around other people who are doing the same,” Modukuru said. Less than a mile from his office, Anysphere Inc. — developer of the popular AI code editor Cursor, which recently surpassed $500 million in annualized revenue — is valued at $20 billion.