published on July 08, 2024 in Front Page News

See a year in the life of San Franciscos AI start-ups fueling the boom

In an opulent ballroom on a Saturday night, the classic pump-up anthem “Eye of the Tiger” blared as artificial intelligence enthusiasts tapped away on their keyboards. This was a hackathon — an event where participants have a set amount of time to collaborate on a project they present to the crowd — at a sprawling mansion about 30 minutes south of San Francisco.

As a professional freelance photographer, I’ve spent the past decade documenting the people and culture of Silicon Valley. Ever since OpenAI’s ChatGPT debuted in November 2022, countless entrepreneurs have been inspired to make their own generative AI tools. Now, nearly every new start-up has an AI element — technology that automates simple tasks, for example, or a chatbot that provides mental health tips.

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In the past year and a half, entrepreneurs from around the world have flocked to San Francisco to be part of this AI revolution. Many start-up founders and their teams live and work together so they can focus intently on building their companies. And evenings like the AI hackathon I visited in March 2023 have become Silicon Valley’s idea of fun.

Here’s a peek inside that world.

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extra: April 2023 demo event where start-ups would present their companies... After the presentations, guests drank tea and mingled with founders.

Evan Stites-Clayton, left, and Dave Fontenot, right, co-founders of the start-up residency Hacker Fellowship Zero, look at photos that were used to entertain guests as they checked in at an April 2023 demo event. Volunteers asked attendees to identify the differences between similar-looking photos to prove they are humans, not robots.

Aqeel Ali (left) and Kevin Baragona work while attending the “Ghosted in SF: Come Code it Off” event at the office of Exa, an AI powered search engine start-up, in San Francisco, Calif., on Saturday, September 30, 2023. The start-up invited friends and members of the AI community to come code at their place for the night after one of the company’s teammates got ghosted on a date the weekend before. They jokingly invited people to come over and work with them instead of wasting another Saturday night being ghosted. The company offices are located in an apartment many of the teammates live in and directly above the apartment housing another start-up, Brev.Dev., which has turned the building into a gathering spot for the AI community.

Aqeel Ali, left, works on a project with the input of Kevin Baragona at the office of Exa, an AI-powered search engine start-up, in San Francisco in September 2023. The start-up — whose members live and work together in an apartment above another start-up — invited their friends to a Saturday night coding party. The vibe resembled a club plus co-working space: Electronic music played and housemates whipped up mac and cheese as they worked into the early-morning hours.

EXTRA: The goal was to use AI to devise solutions to human challenges. // Participants in the “AI For Good” Hackathon work on their laptops as well as take a break to rest during the event at the co-working space Shack15 in the Ferry Building in San Francisco, California on March 25, 2023. The hackathon, organized by Cerebral Valley and Internet Activism, featured 24 hours of coding to build projects, followed by demos. Cerebral Valley is an organization that sprung up to help organize a community around the many people moving to San Francisco to work in AI. They plan co-working days, hackathons, networking meet-ups and other events.

Participants work (and nap) at a 24-hour hackathon at a co-working space in the San Francisco Ferry Building in March 2023. The winners included a project to help prevent AI from being used for spam calls, a tool to help kids learn to read and a platform for therapists to improve mental health care. A year later, the AI boom is still going strong, with some weekends offering multiple hackathons for entrepreneurs to choose from.

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About this story

To capture these photos, Laura Morton was invited into events hosted by the AGI House, Hacker Fellowship Zero, Cerebral Valley, Internet Activism, Decibel, Latent Space, the GAI Collective; the live-work offices of Exa and Brev. Dev; the offices of Blumberg Capital, Pebblebed and Founders Inc.; the co-working spaces Werqwise and SHACK15.

The photography for this article was supported by a grant from the Pierre and Alexandra Boulat Association.

Design and development by Michael Domine. Photo Editing by Monique Woo. Editing by Lisa Bonos and Karly Domb Sadof. Design editing by Betty Chavarria.

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