Who moved my chips? Life in an AI entrepreneurs’ houseshare

It was 10pm at an absurdly ornate mansion in the Bay Area and a hackathon had just finished. About a hundred people were crowded into a room which, with its intricate gold mouldings and baroque fireplace, ought to have been hosting an ancien régime ball. For ten hours they had been labouring over their laptops, building applications that use artificial intelligence (AI). Now that the folding chairs and whiteboards had been pushed to one side, the real work of the evening could begin. It was time for networking – the analogue kind.

These were the luminaries, or wannabes, of the AI industry: entrepreneurs, developers, researchers and financiers. Rich Miner, a co-founder of Android, the mobile operating system, had paid the mansion a visit. Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, and Grimes, a musician and Elon Musk’s on-off consort, often appear at events here. A film crew making a documentary about the AI industry roved around the room.

I saw Rocky Yu, a compact man in white jeans and black T-shirt, amid the throng. The host for the evening, he was in his element making introductions, periodically tilting his head back with laughter. Yu, 39, launched his company, AGI House – a co-living space and events business – in February. He leases the mansion and sublets it to people who work in AI, charging them between $2,000 and $10,000 a month depending on how plush their room is.

The letters AGI stand for artificial general intelligence, a hypothetical type of AI that will be able to complete any intellectual task as well as humans can. Yu’s ambitions for his company are as lofty as the house’s 20-foot ceilings. “Our mission”, he told me, is to “help humanity transition to AGI.”

“Hacker houses” are nothing new: there is a tradition of young tech entrepreneurs lodging together. But the new generation of co-living spaces in and around San Francisco is dedicated to the AI industry. Many of them are clustered in the central neighbourhood of Hayes Valley, earning it the nickname “Cerebral Valley”. The AI boom has convinced lots of people who left the Bay Area during the pandemic to return, sensing that the opportunities offered by the technology were best exploited in person. “SF [San Francisco] has always bought into that mission of hustling super hard,” said Amber Yang of Bloomberg Beta, a venture-capital firm. “These houses capture that ethos.”

AGI House is a half-hour drive from the redbrick Victorian townhouses of Cerebral Valley, in a posh suburb called Hillsborough. Across the street is a golf course; women in expensive athleisure walk their golden retrievers on streets named for different species of trees. I asked Yu to describe the neighbourhood’s residents. “The villains!” he said, laughing, naming the boss of a private-equity firm and Elon Musk, who lived here until recently (apparently his estate was so big it could be seen from space).

The house is worthy of any tycoon. Before I went, I scoped it out on Zillow, a real-estate website, where it’s listed for sale at $68m. Described as a “trophy estate”, it boasts 20,000 square feet, eight bedrooms, ten bathrooms, three entrances, one pool house and a koi pond. Everywhere was marble, walnut, brass. The kitchen was so large it echoed. Yu’s suite was capacious enough that I mistook his study, which had a bed in it, for what he called his “real bedroom”. What could capture the frothiness of the AI boom better than this mansion?

The listing had not prepared me for the strange juxtaposition of grandeur and college-dorm touches. Pieces of paper that read “private bedroom” were taped on doors. There were little reminders that we were in Silicon Valley: a poster of Neo, the computer programmer played by Keanu Reeves in “The Matrix”; a picture of the view of Earth from a spaceship porthole. Rooms were sparsely furnished: one bedroom contained nothing but an air mattress, a bean bag, some weights and a mirror. It was as though a group of holidaying mendicant friars had mistakenly Airbnb’d the Palace of Versailles.

In the vast grounds there was a grove of lemon trees, an aviary (filled with fake birds), a hidden Zen garden and a bocce court that had seen better days. I remarked to Yu how much space they had and how little they seemed to use it. He agreed. “I guess everyone’s busy building AGI, so no one’s actually here, enjoying it.”

Enjoyment is not the point. Underneath Yu’s jovial manner is a hard-nosed determination. He was born into a poor farming family in rural China. Determined to see the world, he spent a couple of years backpacking through Asia, Europe and America. In London he once stayed overnight at an internet café rather than spend £9 ($11) on a hostel bed. He got into Stanford Business School, then launched himself into the San Francisco tech scene.

Yu is not “to the manor born”, and he’s not about to let this manor soften him. Parties are forbidden; alcohol was not served at the hackathon I attended. Yu – who joked that residents call him a “dictator” – repeatedly emphasised that AGI House is “professional”.

Why then, I asked, did he choose such an opulent setting? Yu explained that it had to be glitzy enough to draw the best talent and big enough to comfortably host dinners and hackathons. “We want to create a new centre for Silicon Valley,” he told me with a big smile. And he thinks he’s making progress: people used to tell him they’d never heard of the Hillsborough area. Now, he said, he’s put it on the map.

To live at AGI House, you must be friends with Yu, or a friend of a friend, or the kind of person he would like to be friends with. The nine residents, all in their 20s and 30s, are successful AI entrepreneurs who share Yu’s unfettered ambition. Among the ventures they have launched are Chai, a company with chatbots that tell interactive stories (worth $200m), and Cresta, a firm that uses AI to provide guidance to sales staff during customer calls ($1.6bn).

Dina Yerlan, a 28-year-old who grew up in Kazakhstan, moved into AGI House in March. Other hacker houses, she said, select residents based on likeability. They want you to “be a good person, like someone people want to hang out with”. Whereas “this house is more like, ‘You’re here to do something big…are you ambitious or not?’” She loves how she can come home late on a Friday night and see her housemates still hard at work. “So then I’m more motivated to work because everyone’s just, like, hustling and grinding so hard.”

Yerlan recently left Adobe, a software company, to start her own venture (she won’t tell me anything about it – it’s at too early a stage). She can often be found wandering the house’s cavernous rooms in her sweatpants, listening to podcasts about how industrialists such as Henry Ford built their empires. Yerlan told me she was hoping to get tips on how to “build a really large business that is potentially generational”. She was also reading a biography of Stalin. The Bolsheviks, she said, were “actually very competent people. They actually built a whole new social regime, right? You can argue [it was] terrible or bad, but they were, like, operationally very excellent.”

A relentless work ethic is a prerequisite for AGI House residents. Several of them gave me variations on this line: “I work every waking minute.” Tom Lu, 26, the co-founder of Chai, the chatbot company, told me he worked 16 hours most days. He was born in China and went to boarding school in Britain, followed by Cambridge University. Though he has lived in the house for two months, Lu has never taken a dip in the pool or played putt-putt on the mini-golf course. He invited me to an Italian restaurant one night: in the Uber he realised he had absent-mindedly brought his laptop with him. He gets anxious without it, he said.

When residents hang out in the kitchen, they talk about the latest AI research or get tips on how to raise capital. Josh Payne, also 26, told me he appreciates the camaraderie (building a startup can be “super super lonely”) and the sharing of ideas. It was at an AGI House dinner in May that Payne got the idea for his startup, Coframe, which uses AI to tailor digital interfaces to the needs of their users (someone with poor digital literacy who wanted to order food could chat to an AI agent on DoorDash rather than scroll through a menu).

Payne, from Texas, is poised and extraordinarily accomplished – he plays timpani in the San Francisco Orchestra – with unkempt hair that looked as though he cut it himself. He rents one of the grander rooms in the mansion, with windows overlooking the lemon grove. It seems he can easily afford it: his last company, Autograph, which helps celebrities sell NFTs (non-fungible tokens), is worth more than $1bn. But he told me that most nights he sleeps in the back of his Tesla, which he parks in the driveway. He worries about feeling like “I’ve made it” and getting too comfortable living in luxury. When you wake up after a night in the Tesla (“not that uncomfortable”, he assured me), “you feel energised and ready to go.”

The residents of AGI House live to work – so I wondered what they thought of the possibility that AI will make their jobs redundant. Yerlan told me that AI could do 50% of what she does now, and she predicted that share will increase rapidly. Nonetheless residents seem pretty sanguine about this – they believe AI will create new kinds of work. In any case, the technology is not there yet, “so there is nothing to be feared, at least right now,” Yu said. Easy for him to say. It just so happens he has carved out a job for himself – the consummate Silicon Valley hustler – that an AI will never be able to automate. ■

Charlie McCann is a feature writer for 1843 magazine

Photographs: Aaron Wojack