Everyone in San Francisco is locked in

Everyone in San Francisco is locked in

I just got back from San Francisco.

I knew it was the center of AI. I didn't know it would feel like that from the second you land.

The billboards are model launches

Back home (Europe), billboards sell cars, banks and phone plans.

In SF it's OpenAI. Anthropic. Google. One AI company after another. Your commute is basically a changelog.

Random people talk about frontier models

You walk past people on the street, in a coffee shop or in line somewhere, and they're comparing models. Which one is better at coding. Who shipped what this week. What the next release will change.

Not at a conference. Not on X. Just people out in the city.

Everyone is locked in. If you build with AI, you're not the weird one in the room there. You're just another person in the room.

The city of opportunities

In most places you have to go looking for people who care about this stuff. In SF they're everywhere.

Every conversation could turn into a collab, a job, an intro or a new idea. The energy is hard to describe until you're in it.

If you're in this world, it's probably the best city on the planet right now.

Would I live there?

Probably not. It's very expensive.

But visiting is different. If you're building with AI, go at least once. Walk around, talk to people, sit in the coffee shops. You'll come home with more ideas and more ambition.

Go. Get locked in. Bring the energy home.