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Posted Jun 13, 2023, 3:58 PM
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你的媽媽
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Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: The Bay
Posts: 8,798
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Quote:
They Fled San Francisco. The AI Boom Pulled Them Back.
Erin Griffith, New York Times
June 13, 2023
SAN FRANCISCO — Doug Fulop’s and Jessie Fischer’s lives in Bend, Oregon, were idyllic. The couple moved there last year, working remotely in a 2,400-square-foot house surrounded by trees, with easy access to skiing, mountain biking and breweries. It was an upgrade from their former apartments in San Francisco, where a stranger once entered Fulop’s home after his lock didn’t properly latch.
But the pair of tech entrepreneurs are now on their way back to the Bay Area, driven by a key development: the artificial intelligence boom.
Fulop and Fischer are both starting companies that use AI technology and are looking for co-founders. They tried to make it work in Bend, but after too many eight-hour drives to San Francisco for hackathons, networking events and meetings, they decided to move back when their lease ends in August.
“The AI boom has brought the energy back into the Bay that was lost during COVID,” said Fulop, 34.
The couple are part of a growing group of boomerang entrepreneurs who see opportunity in San Francisco’s predicted demise. The tech industry is more than a year into its worst slump in a decade, with layoffs and a glut of empty offices. The pandemic also spurred a wave of migration to places with lower taxes, fewer COVID restrictions, safer streets and more space. And tech workers have been among the most vocal groups to criticize the city for its worsening problems with drugs, housing and crime.
But such busts are almost always followed by another boom. And with the latest wave of AI technology — known as generative AI, which produces text, images and video in response to prompts — there’s too much at stake to miss out.
Investors have already announced $10.7 billion in funding for generative AI startups within the first three months of this year, a thirteenfold increase from a year earlier, according to PitchBook, which tracks startups. Tens of thousands of tech workers recently laid off by Big Tech companies are now eager to join the next big thing. On top of that, much of the AI technology is open source, meaning companies share their work and allow anyone to build on it, which encourages a sense of community.
“Hacker houses,” where people create startups, are springing up in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley neighborhood, known as “Cerebral Valley” because it is the center of the AI scene. And every night, someone is hosting a hackathon, meetup or demo focused on the technology.
In March, days after the prominent startup OpenAI unveiled a new version of its AI technology, an “emergency hackathon” organized by a pair of entrepreneurs drew 200 participants, with almost as many on the waiting list. That same month, a networking event hastily organized over Twitter by Clement Delangue, CEO of the AI startup Hugging Face, attracted more than 5,000 people and two alpacas to San Francisco’s Exploratorium museum, earning it the nickname “Woodstock of AI.”
Madisen Taylor, who runs operations for Hugging Face and organized the event alongside Delangue, said its communal vibe had mirrored that of Woodstock. “Peace, love, building cool AI,” she said.
Taken together, the activity is enough to draw back people like Fischer, who is starting a company that uses AI in the hospitality industry. She and Fulop got involved in the 350-person tech scene in Bend, but they missed the inspiration, hustle and connections in San Francisco.
“There’s just nowhere else like the Bay,” Fischer, 32, said.
Jen Yip, who has been organizing events for tech workers over the past six years, said that what had been a quiet San Francisco tech scene during the pandemic began changing last year in tandem with the AI boom. At nightly hackathons and demo days, she watched people meet their co-founders, secure investments, win over customers and network with potential hires.
“I’ve seen people come to an event with an idea they want to test and pitch it to 30 different people in the course of one night,” she said.
Yip, 42, runs a secret group of 800 people focused on AI and robotics called Society of Artificers. Its monthly events have become a hot ticket, often selling out within an hour. “People definitely try to crash,” she said.
Her other speaker series, Founders You Should Know, features leaders of AI companies speaking to an audience of mostly engineers looking for their next gig. The last event had more than 2,000 applicants for 120 spots, Yip said.
Bernardo Aceituno moved his company, Stack AI, to San Francisco in January to be part of the startup accelerator Y Combinator. He and his co-founders had planned to base the company in New York after the three-month program ended but decided to stay in San Francisco. The community of fellow entrepreneurs, investors and tech talent that they found was too valuable, he said.
“If we move out, it’s going to be very hard to re-create in any other city,” Aceituno, 27, said. “Whatever you’re looking for is already here.”
After operating remotely for several years, Y Combinator has started encouraging startups in its program to move to San Francisco. Out of a recent batch of 270 startups, 86% participated locally, the company said.
“Hayes Valley truly became Cerebral Valley this year,” Garry Tan, Y Combinator’s CEO, said at a demo day in April.
The AI boom is also luring back founders of other kinds of tech companies. Brex, a financial technology startup, declared itself “remote first” early in the pandemic, closing its 250-person office in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood. The company’s founders, Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi, decamped for Los Angeles.
But when generative AI began taking off last year, Dubugras, 27, was eager to see how Brex could adopt the technology. He quickly realized that he was missing out on the coffees, casual conversations and community happening around AI in San Francisco, he said.
In May, Dubugras moved to Palo Alto, California, and began working from a new, pared-down office a few blocks from Brex’s old one. San Francisco’s high office vacancy rate meant the company paid one-quarter of what it had been paying in rent before the pandemic.
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https://www.sfgate.com/business/arti...k-18146925.php
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