The AI Boom Inside Silicon Valley Start-Up Accelerators - The New York Times

🥇 Bonuses, Promotions, and the Best Online Casino Reviews you can trust: https://bit.ly/BigFunCasinoGame

The AI Boom Inside Silicon Valley Start-Up Accelerators - The New York Times

The archbishop’s mansion in San Francisco, built in 1904, is now a stately hotel at the northeast corner of Alamo Square Park. Since February, it has been rented out entirely to HF0, or Hacker Fellowship Zero, a start-up accelerator that provides 12-week residencies for batches of fellows from 10 different start-ups. Their experience, which culminates in a demonstration day, is supposed to be the most productive three months of the fellows’ lives. Dave Fontenot, one of HF0’s founders, was inspired by the two years he spent living in monasteries in his 20s: While monastery life was materially ascetic, he found that it was luxurious in the freedom it gave residents to focus on the things that really mattered. And at the Archbishop’s Mansion this year, almost everyone has been monastically focused on what has become San Francisco’s newest religion: artificial intelligence. The A.I. gospel had not yet spread in 2021, when Fontenot and his two co-founders, Emily Liu and Evan Stites-Clayton, started the accelerator. Even a year ago, when HF0 hosted a batch of fellows at a hotel in Miami, six out of the eight companies represented were cryptocurrency start-ups. But at the mansion in San Francisco, eight of the 10 companies in HF0’s first batch this year were working on A.I.-based apps, and the lone crypto start-up — focused on what happens to your Bitcoin when you die — was worried, they told me, about whether the investors who showed up at this spring’s demo day would actually want to invest in them. That generative A.I. has largely supplanted crypto in the eyes of founders and venture capitalists alike is not exactly surprising. When OpenAI released ChatGPT late last year, it sparked a new craze at a time when the collapsing crypto and tech markets had left many investors and would-be entrepreneurs adrift, unsure of where to put their capital and time. Suddenly users everywhere were realizing that A.I. could now respond to verbal queries with a startling degree of humanlike fluency. “Large language models have been around for a long time, but their uses were limited,” says Robert Nishihara, a co-founder of Anyscale, a start-up for machine-learning infrastructure. “But there’s a threshold where they become dramatically more useful, and I think now it’s crossed that.” One appeal of generative A.I. is that it offers something for every would-be entrepreneur. For the technically minded, there is research to be done. For the business types, it’s easy to create applications on top of the OpenAI platforms. For the philosophically inclined, A.I. offers interesting avenues through which to explore what it means to be conscious and human. And unlike crypto, especially now, A.I. is a more credible field to be in for mainstream techies. Its products have already achieved significant traction among consumers — ChatGPT is believed to be the fastest app ever to hit 100 million users — and some of the figures at its forefront are familiar faces, now in their second acts, like Sam Altman, formerly the president of the start-up accelerator Y Combinator, and Greg Brockman, formerly the chief technology officer at Stripe, the payments-processing company. In short, you can’t help thinking that, as one friend recently proclaimed to me, “Everyone in S.F. is either starting or running an A.I. company or starting or running an A.I. fund.” A.I., in turn, seems to love San Francisco back. During the pandemic, as tech workers went remote and Twitter pundits evangelized the tax benefits of being in Austin or Miami, the San Francisco area seemed poised to cede its start-up primacy. But recently that trend has reversed. There’s a sense that if you want to be working in A.I., this is still the place to be. “We actually first considered doing the batch in New York, but when I went to New York and asked people what they thought of GitHub Copilot” — an A.I.-powered coding assistant — “people told me they maybe tried it once,” Fontenot said. “On the other hand, people in S.F. told me they were using it to write 50 percent of their code.” Fontenot’s anecdote gets at one of Silicon Valley’s enduring qualities: the willingness, even eagerness, to embrace new technology. Out in the rest of the world, A.I. is triggering nerves — fears and even predictions of wiped-out jobs, of...