San Francisco, the new AI capital
After years of talent flight, the tech world is returning to San Francisco. The city's AI scene is more vibrant than ever – even the high cost of living no longer keeps founders away.
San Francisco has established itself as the pulsing centre of artificial intelligence. After years when high costs drove talent out of the Bay Area, the city is drawing the best minds back – drawn by an AI scene unlike anything it has seen before.
What is at stake
Sam Altman has just returned from a month-long world tour – Israel, India, South Korea, Germany. Back in San Francisco he steps onto a stage at the Bloomberg Technology Summit. “You are the person who will decide our future,” host Emily Chang says in greeting. Half joke, half deadly serious. Since Altman and his team launched ChatGPT in November 2022, the city has been transformed.
The two men behind the boom
The current AI wave was made possible by two people above all: Altman and Jensen Huang. Altman, now 38, founded OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Huang, 60, leads Nvidia – the company whose chips power the massive training runs that make large language models possible. Both owe their success in part to timing and, as Huang tells it, to a meeting at Denny’s diner in 1993 when he and two friends decided to found a graphics chip company. Today Nvidia is worth more than all German car manufacturers combined.
What drives Altman
By the end of the decade, Altman predicts, it will be possible to build artificial general intelligence – a system capable of handling every intellectual task a human can. Whether that timeline is realistic is contested. What is not contested: his speed. No model currently comes close to OpenAI’s, says Aaron Levie, CEO of cloud company Box. Altman was received on his world tour more like a head of state than a start-up CEO, meeting Modi, Sunak, Scholz and others. The message: AI is no longer a Silicon Valley story. It is a geopolitical one.
Why San Francisco is the place to be
Mayor London Breed has started calling San Francisco the “AI capital.” The start-ups Anthropic, OpenAI and Descript are extremely active here. The Databricks Data + AI Summit draws thousands of researchers and engineers. After years of stories about the city’s decline – drugs, homelessness, the exodus of tech workers during the pandemic – the mood has reversed. AI is doing for San Francisco what the smartphone era once did for Cupertino: making it the centre of something that matters to the whole world.
I wrote the full profile of Altman and Huang for Handelsblatt.