‘Hacker house’ becomes AI programming nexus

Hayes Valley. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Constanza Hevia H.
Hayes Valley. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Constanza Hevia H.

SAN FRANCISCO -- On a recent Saturday at noon, about 150 Bay Area techies lined up for a marathon coding session at a $58 million mansion in Silicon Valley that serves as a "hacker house" for startup founders, engineers and researchers.

They had gathered to build apps with artificially intelligent language tools like ChatGPT, a new chatbot from research lab OpenAI -- part of an explosion in recent months of in-person-only AI events.

The eight-bedroom mansion, located in Hillsborough, about halfway between the headquarters for Google and San Francisco-based OpenAI, is called AGI House, focused on what its website calls "the golden age" of AI. It features a koi pond, pool, Zen garden, climate-controlled wine cellar and custom water well. According to Zillow's estimates, rent is roughly $45,000 per month.

Traditionally, hacker houses referred to cramped quarters shared by startup aspirants in search of big ideas and cheaper rent. But the money and power flooding into this wave of AI is warping and intensifying the trappings of a typical Silicon Valley gold rush, now set to explode with the launch of GPT-4. (Zillow estimates the value of AGI House at only $18 million, a third of its asking price.)

In recent months, many people, most of them young, have flocked to the Bay Area's AI scene to be closer to the action of hackathons, meetups, fireside chats and happy hours. They want to secure their place in an economic future that tech leaders insist will be upended by AI.

"They're at your house party, they're everywhere," said Gloria Felicia, one of the winners of the hackathon at AGI House. The co-founder of Speedify AI and startup adviser to Spero Studios, she advertised spots in "an AGI House for women," opening next month in Hayes Valley, an upwardly mobile neighborhood in downtown San Francisco.

Amber Yang, an AI investor with Bloomberg Beta, went viral in January after tweeting that San Franciscans were now calling Hayes Valley "Cerebral Valley" because of the concentration of "AI communities and hacker houses," amid the trendy restaurants, boutiques, outdoor gyms and stores for e-commerce brands like Allbirds and Brooklinen.

A combination of Big Tech layoffs, a post-lockdown return to in-person events and lower barriers to entry have inspired a number of new group houses. The promise of easy money helps.

While tech stocks falter, venture capital investors have already funneled $3.6 billion into 269 AI deals in the United States from January through mid-March, according to the investment analytics firm PitchBook, which found that nearly half of the $40.5 billion in AI startup funding in the country last year was concentrated in Bay Area companies.

In a sign of the times, the Hillsborough mansion recently changed its name from Neogenesis to AGI House. AGI is short for "artificial general intelligence," a phrase popularized by OpenAI to describe the idea of AI that is smarter than a human. OpenAI argues that tools like ChatGPT, which can instantly answer questions or generate text like software code and college essays, or the text-to-image generator DALL-E, can respond to a user's natural language prompt, as steppingstones toward superhuman AI. The term "AGI" has become a watchword for proponents who share the belief that this technological wave of AI will transform the internet.

"It's sort of become the new crypto," said Moritz Wallawitsch, a 24-year-old German startup founder who moved to the Bay Area in November. Unlike crypto, he quickly added, AI is generating a lot of value because it's "automating jobs."

Hacker houses are "symptomatic of when people are just all in on building a company and when people are like trying to immerse themselves and learn from others," said investor Sarah Guo, founder of the early-stage venture capital firm Conviction, who recently attended a dinner at AGI House.

"Obviously it doesn't work for people at every life stage in every lifestyle," Guo continued. But co-living is working for the employees of one of her portfolio companies, Harvey, which is building AI models for law firms, because they're excited about growing their company quickly. "They don't really do anything else right now. They just work," she said.

The cost of renting a room in a hacker house works much like having roommates. Openings for rooms in Bay Area communal housing for April run from $650 per month for a shared room up to $3,000, according to a Google doc of different types of collectives. Some houses have an additional monthly fee for shared groceries or cleaning.

The application process is more unusual. Some houses have websites with links to Google forms for would-be members and consider where you work and technical prowess. Others just post a photo of the digs on social media and encourage interested parties to message them on Twitter.

Co-living has been key to building the Bay Area's tightknit AI scene over the past decade. It's part of the origin stories for OpenAI and Anthropic, two of the wealthiest AI startups, both based in San Francisco. Socializing at those houses became a fast track to hearing about jobs at a top research lab, access to startup investors, and even insight on technology from the people who develop it.

The allure of events at AGI House is the possibility of meeting Silicon Valley elite. The weekend hackathon was sponsored in part by Hugging Face, the open-source AI company valued at $2 billion, with welcome remarks from tech luminary Sebastian Thrun, the self-described godfather of self-driving cars.

  photo  Gloria Felicia in Hayes Valley. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Constanza Hevia H.
 
 
  photo  The kitchen of the "AGI House for women," opening next month in Hayes Valley. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Constanza Hevia H.
 
 
  photo  The house for women aims to be focused on safety and inclusion, with no alcohol or drugs. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Constanza Hevia H.
 
 
  photo  Hayes and Octavia Streets in the Hayes Valley neighborhood, referred to as "Cerebral Valley." MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Constanza Hevia H.
 
 
  photo  Gloria Felicia, co-founder of Speedify AI and start-up adviser at Spero Studios, takes a walk in the Hayes Valley neighborhood of San Francisco. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Constanza Hevia H.
 
 

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