There is one obvious reason that the tech industry’s ground zero for big ideas has moved north from Silicon Valley to San Francisco: OpenAI, the company that created the ChatGPT chatbot that started the A.I. craze, has its offices in a neighborhood that people in the tech industry have started calling the Arena. Anthropic, a rival A.I. start-up founded by former OpenAI researchers, is also in San Francisco. And many of the Silicon Valley investors who put money into start-ups have moved up the highway into the city.
San Francisco officials, stung by offices that emptied during the pandemic, companies that left town (temporarily, it turned out) and warnings (generally overstated) that the city was on the ropes, have mostly welcomed the newcomers. And there is a sense that the city, led by its new mayor, Daniel Lurie, is ready to turn the page on its pandemic-era woes, even if many housing and drug problems persist.
“It used to be that you built your company in Palo Alto. Investors loved it because there were no distractions,” said Steven Pham, the head of media for Y Combinator, the famed Bay Area start-up incubator. “Now all the founders want to live in the city. It’s where their friends are. It’s where the action is.”
Here is a cheat sheet to where the tech industry’s young A.I. builders are living, working and playing in San Francisco.
Where to Find Your A.I. Co-Founder and Roommate and Lover (Maybe in the Same House)
The young intellects of the A.I. boom cannot be accused of false modesty.
Hayes Valley, a central neighborhood just a few blocks from the gilded dome of City Hall, has been coined “Cerebral Valley” by tech insiders. A.I. developers and aspiring founders have — much to the surprise of longtime residents — made a home here.
The neighborhood started to gentrify when an old highway offramp was replaced by a boulevard and a park that now frequently features artwork from Burning Man and talk of artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., and venture funding.
Hayes Valley mixes historic Victorians and new high rises with $10 scoops of ice cream, blocks of low-income housing and stores with names like Fig & Thistle and Brass Tacks. And some tech founders have converted the neighborhood’s colorful houses to “hacker houses,” where start-up employees can work together during the day and host parties at night. While rumors of polyamorous living abound in these group-home situations, there is little doubt that the main focus is A.I. — building A.I., improving the world with A.I. and then saving the world from the A.I. that they build.
Unlike swankier tech gatherings in Silicon Valley, Hayes Valley parties run on venture capital money that flows directly through the alcohol section of the nearby Trader Joe’s.
“It’s clusters of the poorest-dressed millionaires around,” said Rene Turcios, a longtime attendee of the city’s hackathon circuit.
Where to Find Your Next Investor
If San Francisco has an answer to New York City’s West Village, it’s the Marina, a remarkably pretty bayside neighborhood dense with espresso martinis and Lululemon gear. OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, lives a mile away in a $27 million mansion. And other tech billionaires like David Sacks, President Trump’s A.I. czar, live in mansions on the steep hills above.
Now the city’s young engineers and programmers are elbowing into this shiny area, long the domain of Greek-life alumni and great teeth.
The space is in Fort Mason, a complex of historic red-roofed military buildings next to the Marina that now host nightly tech events and A.I. dinners. While teams of founders and start-ups can apply for official residency in the space, some engineers and entrepreneurs often just show up to the building unannounced, looking to mingle and poach talent for their own projects.
A few miles down the waterfront is Shack15, a social club for entrepreneurs and founders in the city’s Ferry Building, where commuters take boats north to Marin County and to cities on the east side of the bay. It has also become a place for local politicians like Mayor Lurie to hobnob with the tech elite.
Like Fort Mason, the Ferry Building is a historic landmark. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was where hopeful prospectors arrived by train and boat to get rich off the gold rush. Now it’s where aspiring entrepreneurs go to order matcha lattes and dream up the potential of A.I.
Where to Find Some of the Most Important A.I. Start-Ups
Tech entrepreneurs have taken to calling a slice of San Francisco — between the Potrero Hill, Mission and South of Market neighborhoods — the Arena. With its wide streets and industrial facades, it has become a testing ground for the newest robot taxi prototypes before they move into more residential terrain. It has also become home to businesses like OpenAI and the software companies Notion and Chroma.
It is, in many ways, the mirror image of the Marina: a diverse neighborhood with an older and more tattooed crowd that frequents burrito spots and vermouth bars. Old warehouses and factories have become industrial-chic start-up offices. In the South of Market neighborhood, warehouses full of tech start-ups building hardware mix with generations-old car detailing shops.
Like Hayes Valley, this area has rapidly gentrified, but is still home to beloved older bars like Connecticut Yankee and Bottom of the Hill. A hot spot for deal-making in the neighborhood is the famed Tartine Manufactory bakery, around the block from OpenAI’s nondescript office in an old mayonnaise factory.
Where to Learn the Ropes
The epicenter of the social media boom launched in San Francisco by Twitter and other companies was South Park, a neighborhood a mile from the city’s financial district. Its oval park is across the street from the office of Wired magazine, a leading chronicler of the dot-com boom. The neighborhood emptied out during the pandemic (though many of the newcomers were probably in high school when that happened) and became a symbol of San Francisco’s struggles.
Y Combinator, which was an early investor in companies like Airbnb and DoorDash, moved its campus from Mountain View, a half-hour drive from the city, to the neighborhood of Dogpatch, which is walking distance from South Park, in 2023.
Many company founders working with Y Combinator live in newly built high-rise apartments nearby, which has given the neighborhood the feel of a tech founder playground. At night, many of the apartments are lit up with colorful lights, like a college dorm.
The A.I. surge is bringing back the bustle, filling streets with tech workers riding electric scooters and billboards advertising the latest (and often indecipherable) A.I. innovations.
On a recent Thursday afternoon, the park was filled with tech workers taking lunch breaks. Some paced back and forth while discussing the latest A.I. regulations on their AirPods between sips of cortado.
The only vintage clothing worn around these parts are backpacks and hoodies with old Netflix and Facebook logos.
Eli Tan covers the technology industry for The Times from San Francisco.
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