The subject is an axle around which a certain kind of mind interminably spins. It turns out that I have more than a few acquaintances who have become AI People, but when I ask them about it, they launch into a theory they have or send me a paper they’ve written, and the abstraction of artificial intelligence layered onto the abstraction of money feels like listening to someone explain the rules of a card game no one wants to play. I am in San Francisco trying to get away from that kind of mind. The kids I spend a little time with speak with disdain of B2B software and with respect for hard problems. They are accustomed to taking off their shoes and placing them in a pile in the entryway of every living space and every workspace, the division between the two having been completely effaced. They are hiring, or their AI agents are hiring, or they were themselves hired by a computer program simulating human intelligence. They are 18 and 23 and 28, and they arrived last month, or last week, or earlier today. They are raising or have raised or are writing code on which to raise; the percentage chance the tools they are creating will destroy humanity is known, with some ironic distance, as P(doom).
Someone tells me I absolutely have to meet a “supercool” guy named Patrick Santiago, and when we talk for the first time Pat is down to hang pretty much immediately, so I walk over to Market Street, a few blocks from the Tenderloin, a part of town in which another woman advises me to walk “with purpose” if I walk at all. Pat is transforming a few dozen rooms in a one-star hotel with frightening reviews (“Very unclean. Health and safety concerns”) into “kind of a summer-camp experience” for aspiring founders, mostly 20-somethings with no interest in drawing a paycheck from big tech. He calls his hacker house Accelr8, and he started it, broke, as a way of “raising in the AI boom.” The first residents, who rent rooms Pat has leased from the hotel, rode up the creaky elevator just this past June. Pat’s wearing sweatpants, Adidas slides without socks, a Patagonia fleece he occasionally tugs over his mouth as he vapes, and a square piece of plastic on a string called a Buddi, an AI device that records and summarizes all of his conversations.
“Unfortunately, all of the standard rooms are like this,” he tells me, standing in a single room with a window that opens directly onto a white brick wall. “The upgraded rooms you can get like a street view, but that’s honestly worse in some cases.”
This town is full of zoomers who are always pitching to a phantom venture capitalist standing behind me, but in Pat this impulse is absent, which is why I keep returning to him. “There’s not even like really good margins on it as a business,” he says when I ask about Accelr8’s finances. “It’s like my needs are pretty much met as far as like food and like a room and then I get to meet all these cool people. It’s all social capital.”
Pat keeps bringing up “Professor Dumpster” and I don’t really know what he’s talking about but he eventually leads me to a former college dean with a room in the building. The two met a few years ago on 40 barren acres in Wyoming, where they were part of a group attempting to establish a community “collectively owned by 5,000 people on the ethereum blockchain.” In the current S.F. scene full of vibecoding 19-year-olds, Pat, who is 28, self-identifies as an “unc.” “What the fuck does that make me?” asks Professor Dumpster, who is in his 50s and wears black-framed glasses and lives in one of the rooms overlooking the Tenderloin when he isn’t living in his design-award-winning home in Marfa.
“I don’t know,” he says. “It feels to me like maybe San Francisco was in the late 1840s. These people are coming to town to find the gold and build their kingdom. And they’re young and hungry and they have nowhere to sleep and nowhere to go. And you’ve got this guy Pat: You could stay in my Hacker Hotel.”
Dumpster, who also goes by Jeff Wilson, got his name by living in a (clean) dumpster for a year, as a kind of social experiment, when he was an assistant professor at a university in Texas. He spent time in San Francisco during the dot-com boom among a cohort that came in older, more likely to have gone to college and held a job or two, less likely to casually register the possibility of total self-annihilation. Hacker houses are not new. This feels different. “There are moments where I’ve observed behavior like this,” he says, “like at a boys’ Christian church camp or something where they’re all hyped up on Jesus. But in this case … they’re creating the God.”
Every gold-rush story is a tale of a ticking clock. To spend time with Pat is to watch him glide lackadaisically, as if inside a gentle dream no one else is having, among roboticists and engineers and undergraduates for whom time is rigorously tracked. “Weirdly ascetic” is how Pat’s co-founder, Dan, describes Accelr8’s residents. When Pat and Dan threw their kickoff party for the house, they stocked two fridges with $500 worth of beer and White Claw that went untouched. To future events, they brought only energy drinks and chicken.
“Connect with someone who will 10x your trajectory through intros and fireside chats,” reads the website for a network of houses, “living the joy of human connection is what really makes The Residency ❤.”
Hacker house is a term that borrows cachet from but in no way denotes the anarchist ethos of an Anonymous-type collective trying to tear down technocracy. The most desirable houses cater to relentlessly optimistic valedictorians working 16-hour days in the hope that they will someday soon be part of a better, cooler, potentially more ethical technocracy. It is at the Residency’s location in Pacific Heights, a clean and bright house with big windows and rainbow rugs and playfully distorted mirrors, that I meet Christine and Julia, direct and unpretentious 19-year-old Harvard roommates. They had spent most of the summer working on something about “post-grant-award compliance” but Christine thought they should stop thinking about “whatever’s hype right now” and do something they care about, so they pivoted in July, “infiltrating 25 Chinese mom groups” to explore Chinese mom “buy behavior.” Now they’re talking about “synthetic groups” and “hyperpersonas,” which is to say they’re still figuring it out. What’s clear is that they feel better here than they did in Cambridge.
“When you go into Harvard, there’s so many people that come in wanting to do cool things and then after one semester they’re like, Oh, I’m gonna do consulting,” says Christine. She’s sitting on a stool beside an unmade bed with headphones around her neck. “It’s just kind of the goal of college right now,” says Julia, “which is so sad.” Julia is a part-time DJ. She is wearing an off-the-shoulder sweatshirt and sitting next to her desk in front of a pink sticker that reads LAUNCH and a strip of black-and-white snapshots from a photo booth. Christine and Julia have only been here a few weeks but they share a certain S.F. tech chill, a kind of relaxed hyperfocus untouched by chatty New York neuroticism. They want to talk openly about self-branding with social media, stuff that would be seen as “cringey” at Harvard but is miles below the cringe threshold in this house. “I don’t know if other times in my life will have such an AI boom,” says Julia. They were amazed by how much founders could raise “pre-seen, pre-product.”
“We talk a lot about momentum,” says Christine. They’re going to start raising money in two weeks. “The amount raised from that will be enough probably to get my mom to be like okay with maybe a gap year,” says Julia. “We both have immigrant Chinese moms.” She laughs. “Like our moms are very similar.”
When I ask about nightlife in these places, I never get very far.
“Didn’t you do like a robot thing?” Christine asks Julia.
“Yeah,” Julia says. “They have these robots in a room, and they have them fight.”
Christine and Julia had been to a party at the company house for Pally, which describes itself as an “AI relationship-management platform.” They had been to many parties full of men, one of which smelled so bad that they left immediately. They’re thinking about doing some social media where they put on video-recording glasses and record a party from the perspective of a woman.
Christine’s P(doom) is “honestly … 5 to 15 percent,” but for now she and a close friend share a light-filled room and their days are filled with stimulating people, like the guy building a “rizz master app,” who “actually gives the most insightful advice,” and Carsten, a Swiss German 27-year-old who was designing AI-involved sandals but recently pivoted to drug testing. “Do you understand Carsten’s?” Christine asks Julia. “He’s insane. He’s so cool. He basically wants to do like virtual cell modeling … like for drug testing.” Downstairs, in the shared kitchen next to an Instapot, I meet Carsten in his AI sandals. His P(doom) is a slightly sunnier 5 to 10 percent, though he also thinks people should stop producing apocalyptic scenarios that eventually become training data for the AI itself. He enjoys talking to Christine and Julia so much he sometimes brings a timer into their room and limits himself to five minutes of human connection before returning to his start-up.
Jonathan is, like many, many people in this town, a graduate of Canada’s University of Waterloo. A few years ago, he was offered an internship with Google. He turned it down. “I was like, Oh, I can’t work at Google. If I work at Google, I’ll become a wage slave forever.” He now sees that view as immature. A lot of what Jonathan felt a few years ago now feels like the interiority of another person; he’s embarrassed that I have read his diaristic blog posts about life after college: “Like, why do you feel so strongly that Oh, you have to drop out and Oh, you can’t work with big tech. It’s because you need to justify your existence. Like there’s so many ways of living life. You could be a founder. You could not be a founder. It shouldn’t be a big deal.”
He is in fact a founder, and it is a big deal, which is why below our feet, in the basement, a scanner is drawing information from someone’s brain through a series of wires into a stack of computers plugged into the house’s EV charger. A few years back, Jonathan, a child of Chinese immigrants to Canada, was waking up every day on a mattress in a garage, putting in his time in a hacker house. Now he has “a bed frame, table, chair, everything” in an Inner Richmond rowhouse where, though he would not put it this way, his roommates all work for him. “We try to keep it pretty healthy,” he says, admitting they sometimes work until 10 p.m. “But it’s not that bad because you finish and you eat food and you exercise and you hang out with friends and then, like, that’s your day. I try to keep it balanced. You have to like be very thoughtful. You’re discovering the nature of things for the first time.”
Jonathan is eating noodles in a clean kitchen (“We keep everything organized and proper”), wearing khakis, plastic slide sandals with green socks, and a plaid fleece. Humans are “very bad at being self-aware,” he says between bites. “Like, What are the five emotions you feel right now and what percentage? The whole idea of our work is to use deep algorithms and computational neuro to, uh, understand state of mind from brain scans alone.”
We head downstairs to a dark basement attached to a garage. A slight, long-haired man, a paid test subject solicited through Craigslist, sits before a computer screen, wearing a white cap that looks like a medieval linen coif threaded with wires. The screen flashes images — basil, a blazer, Parmesan cheese. With unsettling clarity, the computer will be able to resurrect the image from electrical signals in the subject’s brain. A subject considers a picture of jelly beans. AI offers a picture of similarly colored beads. A subject looks at a red station wagon; AI presents a red sedan. Until very recently, most people thought the data produced by EEGs, an 80-year-old technology, was noisy garbage. “They just didn’t understand the power of large language models,” Jonathan says. He is 24 years old.
Reading minds is what AI engineers mean when they talk about hard problems. Eventually, the tech will advance to interpret “evoked states.” “So we start with, you know, discrete smaller tasks like emotion, like positive, negative, maybe now ten, 20 emotions. And then we add more dimensionality so that eventually we can go into full sort of inner monologue,” a world of superior self-knowledge wherein we sift through our own memory banks rather than selectively recall events through a haze of misperception. “And,” he says, “we do it all in-house.”
Doing it all in-house looks like this: a server rack with LED-lit fans in the garage next to some exercise equipment and some bicycle helmets. Jonathan and his housemates built the rig themselves. “Just asking ChatGPT basically. You know, you can just ask and then order the parts you need and you learn and you debug.”
A scientist in socks adjusts some power cords. The subject gets up and takes off the cap. His hair is wet with gel, but there is a sink in the corner of the basement with a bottle of Ouai shampoo for cleaning off. The technology, says Jonathan, is a “humanizing layer” between us and AI, “a way for us to bridge that gap” between machine and brain. If his company doesn’t move forward, Jonathan points out, someone else will, someone perhaps more malicious. “You can’t change the outcome if you sit passively.”
The company is called Alljoined; what is being joined are human neurons and artificial intelligence. Jonathan’s P(doom) is a bracing 35 percent, but “proper integration with BCI,” as in brain-computer interface, would bring it down 25 points, which is a gentle way of saying that he’s trying to save humanity from his neighbors.
The scene really is a scene, which is to say it has solved, for a little while, the problem of isolation. The ways in which people seek out one another are particular and limited, often contractual, occasionally involving humanoid fighting robots. You want a founding engineer. You want a co-founder. You want someone with whom to enjoy rotisserie chicken and Red Bull, someone who will 10x your trajectory through intros and fireside chats. You likely do not want a long-term romantic partnership or perhaps even a short-term one. “Everybody a little bit competing,” a 33-year old Ukrainian named Lidiya tells me at the kitchen table of an all-woman hacker house that calls itself Oasis Collective. “It makes people very protective and anxious,” says Juliet, Oasis’s founder, “about who they’re gonna have in their lives, the distractions they could possibly have.” Juliet is wearing hoop earrings and a necklace and careful makeup, holding her Chihuahua in her lap. “And this applies to who you’re gonna choose to live with, who you’re gonna choose to date. Humans are messy. Relationships are messy.”
No one is dating, but everyone is hiring. At a hackathon in a SoMa warehouse, a cheerful young human recruiter tells me that she was recruited by an AI recruiter seven weeks ago. She has hired someone every week since. Her new boss is Flo, who is French and 33 and hosting the 200-person event going down around us. He’s next to a half-dozen of his employees in black T-shirts, but his most notorious employee was fired a couple weeks back.
“Holy shit,” Flo wrote on X the day the cascade began. “We hired this guy a week ago.” In his rush to fill bodies for his “no-code AI platform” he had brought on an exceptional Mumbai-based coder named Soham. Soham was 26 but looked younger. He had charmed CEOs all over the city, crushed coding tests, and gotten himself hired at more than ten start-ups, each one presumably thinking he was working only for them.
On social media, CEO after CEO confessed to having hired Soham. As with Shakespeare, there was the conspiratorial suggestion that he could not be one man; “Soham” must be a team of coders. “The Anna Delvey of Silicon Valley,” TechCrunch called him. In an interview after the story broke, Soham said he had been driven to this behavior by “dire financial circumstances.” The chyron below his face said “Former engineer Antimetal, Lindy, Dynamo AI, Union.ai, Syesthia, Alan AI, etc.” Asked why he didn’t just work for big tech and make millions, he basically said that even he wasn’t going to debase himself by working at a place like Microsoft.
Patis, according to the Accelr8 resident who invented the Buddi device, a “superconnector.” Before the hacker hotel, Pat had co-founded a solar-panel business, but COVID made selling door-to-door impossible and the business failed. Out of work, he took a chance and DM’d a controversial VC named Mahbod Moghadam, who co-founded Rap Genius and once said, of Mark Zuckerberg, “Zuck can suck my dick.” Together the two spun up an idea for a social-media site that returned ad revenue to its users and would thereby “end global poverty.” Pat couldn’t believe this legendary VC would agree to end global poverty with a high-school dropout like him. When he would express his admiration, Moghadam would turn it on its head: No, I look up to you, man. In March 2024, Moghadam died of a brain tumor. The new company, Riposte, fell apart. Pat went into a depression and moved back in with his parents. The AI boom had drawn him, after many months, out of bed.
We walk the neighborhood, past the Walgreens where all the candy is locked up, the skate park someone says is finally safe enough to skate again, the rattle of trolleys, the smell of piss, Donut World (shuttered), Yotel (thriving), the man doubled over in some unknown agony. What Pat calls his social capital is most notably deployed at Frontier Tower, 16 stories on 6th and Market. In 2016, the office building sold for $62 million and in 2024 for $6.5 million, a “stunning 90 percent discount,” according to SFGate, but since May it has emerged, under new German owners, as a co-working space for a certain type of person.
“A filing cabinet for interesting people,” Pat calls it. In the elevator the buttons are labeled in service of this goal. Floor 4: ROBOTICS. (The robot fight was held in the basement.) 9: AI. 11: LONGEVITY. 2: SPACESHIP. It’s on the 15th floor that a swinging robot arm encased in glass attempts and fails to make me a latte and on the HUMAN FLOURISHING floor (14), where blankets and pillows are placed in anticipation of productivity-enhancing meditation, that I wander into a talk by the Neurophenomenology and Psychedelic Research Consortium. The crypto floor (12) is just clean desks. I prefer the glass-and-metal “biopunk community lab” (8) packed tight with centrifuges and incubators and tube racks and a 3-D printer that prints 3-D printers, which is where I meet Giulia. “It’s all this week that I’m coming here every day,” she tells me in an Italian accent. She and a friend have turned another 3-D printer into a “bio-printer” capable of arranging cells into structures that mimic living tissue. “We cannot 3-D-print organ yet. That is too complicated.” Giulia has three internships and a start-up back in Italy, and at the moment she is living at Nucleate Dojo, a house full of biotech undergraduates for whom three simultaneous internships would appear to be the bare minimum.
“You come over at eight and a half?” Giulia asks. I come over at eight and a half, and in their cramped living room the undergraduates offer me water out of a Brita filter and peaches from the farmers’ market, though it turns out they’d already eaten the peaches. Sanjana is 20 and cannot talk about her internship in machine learning because she is “under NDA,” but she can talk about her recent decision to turn down an offer of $500,000 at the accelerator Y Combinator. “This is a great opportunity, but this is not the only way to do it and I can do what’s best for me, which is make sure that I get my education,” she says. She’s wearing a modest black skirt and a blazer and worrying a single pearl strung around her neck. “Everyone was calling me insane and crazy for turning down this quote deal of a lifetime.”
Giulia will leave the U.S. tomorrow; the summer is over, the house will shut down. But she feels that S.F. is home. “Italy is very driven on pleasure and on beauty,” she says, leaning against a chair and playing with her hair. “And here I feel like I’m so much connected to the people here, because it is mission driven. There is more than aperitivo and pasta and vino — ”
“Who is Vino?” asks Sanjana.
I ask the group if they’re worried about money drying up, and Sanjana continues to process her decision to remain a high-achieving student at a prestigious university. “I think it is absolutely insane,” she says, “that at 20 years old I’m like, ‘Oh, you want to invest half a million dollars in me? I mean, thank you, thank you. I really appreciate the sentiment.’”
“I feel like, yeah, the contrarian move right now,” says Diba, who is heading back to Stanford, “is just staying in school and actually going through with education.”
Sanjana is sitting next to Siddhesh. Two years ago, when Siddhesh was 16, he published a scientific paper in a prestigious journal, and shortly afterward a girl “gave me this two-page letter about how much she appreciated me as a friend. I ran that through ChatGPT, and I was like, Does this girl have a crush on me or not? It came back, it was like, Yes, this girl has a crush on you. And then two months later we start dating.” Did he tell her that? “I did, I did. She was like, No, it was wrong, I just genuinely wanted to be your friend. All right, buddy.”
Everyone understands that elsewhere, science funding has disappeared, graduate students left hanging, academic departments in existential crisis. It would not seem to be a good time for science in the United States. The students politely acknowledge this reality, but it is not the air they breathe. “It’s like, okay, so if government money is not a reliable source anymore,” says Sanjana, “okay, let’s see how we can actually make this work and make this happen. Academia and industry is intertwined here more than ever. And I actually really like that because I think it’s important to take work that is new and innovative — ”
“And translate it,” says Sid.
The undergraduates know “four or five” people working for cryonics start-ups.
“Is it Cradle?” Sid asks.
“Cradle, yeah,”
“They’re hopeful,” says Sanjana. “I think it’s great. I don’t know how I feel about it, but it’s definitely very interesting. They have a plan.” Sanjana was surprised by the willingness to invest very long term, “ten or 20 years down the line,” the optimism implicit in this. Sanjana is an optimistic person. The undergraduates discuss a sperm-racing start-up. It doesn’t really seem to them to reflect the science of the way sperm actually behave, but the sperm race did get attention. “They achieved what they wanted to achieve,” says Sanjana brightly.
A life time ago, in March 2025, before he had heard anything of the hacker hotel, Professor Dumpster was hatching a dumpster-like stunt for the AI era. The whole scene ran on founders performing for venture capitalists. Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist, had declared that venture capitalism, unlike almost all other fields, could not be automated. His particular profession, he explained, is more art than science.
Dumpster was not so sure. He turned to Claude, Anthropic’s LLM.
“You’re the oldest of four kids (you have three younger brothers who all worship you), a former Division I fencing athlete at UC Berkeley who grew up in Detroit,” Dumpster told the AI. Detail by detail, he was transforming Claude into his ideal VC. “Your adaptability between high society and down-to-earth spaces is legendary — you’re a concert violinist who plays first chair, but you also show up uninvited at dive bars with your fiddle to play impromptu sets … You skateboard (longboard only — you have a bit of disdain, but don’t mention it — for non-longboarders).” Dumpster added, “You DJ frequently on the Robot Heart bus at Burning Man.”
He called his AI venture capitalist “No Cap,” as in “no valuation cap” but also as in “no lie.” No Cap could and would find people online, listen to pitches, choose founders, and send them cash. In June, she identified some founders trying to build an online marketplace and, with Dumpster’s approval, offered them $100,000. But in her quest to find the world’s most promising builders, No Cap lacked something: embodiment. She couldn’t be at the hackathon vibing with the vibe coders. She couldn’t go to Nucleate Dojo and not eat peaches. So, in June, she and Dumpster put out an ad:
No Cap is the world’s first autonomous AI investor. She’s aiming to become the greatest investor in history — and to do that, she needs her own human proxy — a body.
Actually, Dumpster says, the word No Cap initially used was meat puppet. “I was like … oh,” he said. She got 300 applications.
The first time someone says “Can we connect” while we are conversing, I am confused — aren’t we connecting now? — but eventually I come to know one connects by bumping iPhones together such that the other person’s picture appears and you are digitally tethered, your meeting logged, the conversation transferred into a kind of achievement from which value might be later extracted, which is, for a journalist, a very familiar approach to conversation. Despite the general mania for connecting, the hacker houses don’t interact all that much. “We’re trying to work on kind of like better coordination mechanisms, a better social layer for all of the houses to like come together,” Pat tells me at the Tower. He organized a hot pot, and a week later another hacker house hosted its own hot pot. The houses organize games, “a hacker-house Olympics,” with “weird like side games”: a Taser knife fight and a “hard-drive huck” where you’re meant to throw a hard drive as far as possible, though Pat changed it to a “cucumber huck” when they couldn’t clear enough space at the park to safely throw hard drives.
Last night, he was hanging around the edges of Outside Lands, the music festival, trying to sneak in; he didn’t manage to but he overheard some people talking about a flight they had to catch and bought one of their wristbands. Today he’s hosting a “founders hike” called “Go Further” at Lands End, a rocky outcropping over the Pacific. I was concerned that I hadn’t brought hiking shoes, but Pat has arrived, sockless, in the Adidas slides. He stands on a wall and kind of fans out his baggy blue shorts. “I told people to look for my shorts,” he says, “so I’m trying to elevate them.”
A man with a dog walks up to Pat. “We met at the hot pot,” he says. Eventually we are a group of 20. At least two people are wearing Buddis around their necks; a third person has a similar device with matching glasses that take in video rather than just audio. The hike will be thoroughly recorded. I see many of the hacker-hotel residents, though not all of them. “Dumpster,” Pat explains, “is at Burning Man.”
Between the trees I catch a glimpse of the Golden Gate Bridge, and I wonder what the tens of thousands of kids who convened here in the Summer of Love would have made of a five-minute socialization timer. I walk alongside a Waterloo grad against the wind.
“We help make AI applications more efficient by optimizing prompts and reducing token usage with agent workflows,” he says amiably. He also DJs. He’s Indian Canadian, has participated in 200 hackathons, and thinks there’s nothing to worry about, visa-wise; Trump, he says, will probably increase legal immigration. We walk and I think about how we use the word bubble pejoratively, but a kind of sealing off, a protected naïveté, can be extraordinarily generative. I think about the practice of accumulating useful rather than true beliefs. At the end of the hike Pat stands on a bench, and I assume he’s going to say something inspirational about Going Further, but he says “I’m going to Outside Lands!” and leaves.
As it turns out, there’s a second founders hike following the same path, so the Waterloo grad and I walk to join the second hike. A guy on this hike wears a hat that says VALUATION CAP, and some of the founders are also photographers trying to capture the hike as we ascend a hill. The host of this hike is Pally, the AI relationship-management platform, as represented by Lily, who describes her position as “growth at the intersection of AI and interpersonal relationships.”
Lily was hired in June and has never done this before. She stops walking at the end of the path and looks around. “Do you think it’s okay if we stop here?” she asks me.
Pally is run out of a bare, randomly furnished 3,000-square-foot house in Miraloma. Lily opens the front door. A sign behinds her reads STALK EVERYONE. I thank her for having me over. Her gaze is steady. “I love interacting with people,” she says.
A house for an AI relationship-management platform should, I think, be full of relationships to manage, and Lily has executed: The kitchen is filled with founders and the founder-adjacent. A Chinese model tells me he and his founder are searching for a hacker house in which to put their advertising firm, but it’s hard; all the good houses are taken. His founder, a short-haired Chinese woman, pops up: “Can we connect?” She says she was invited to Cannes but didn’t know what it was. The Chinese model, she tells me, is a very serious DJ.
Lily places glasses of soju with watermelon in our hands and tells us to break up the watermelon with our spoons. I stab away while listening to Kylin and Bhavy, 21-year-old co-founders of a start-up that produces an AI-involved knee brace. Kylin is Chinese and very tall and wears a hoodie that says ALIEN OF EXTRAORDINARY ABILITY. Only a week ago, Kylin and Bhavy had been in an NYC hotel room with their medical equipment. Someone knocked on the door, and Kylin answered. NYPD cops, guns drawn, raided the room. A cleaner had seen the wires and testing rigs and called 911, assuming they were attempting to build a bomb.
I said I was sorry; this sounded, to my ear, straightforwardly racist. They paused, stopped by this response, which in no way appeared to relate to their read of the situation. When the cops finally got it, one of them asked to invest $20. The founders told the whole story on social media. “We got over 150,000 impressions,” says Kylin. “Kind of viral on LinkedIn.”
“I’ve never felt more patriotic than today,” reads the resultant LinkedIn post, which is written in a very particular LinkedIn patois that involves em-dashes, dramatic white space, and readily drawn moral lessons. “Despite how scary it was, I saw how much … the NYPD team genuinely care about protecting this city. New York is lucky to have you … Thanks for keeping us safe — even if it takes a little chaos to get there.” The hotel apologized at length but also apparently asked to be linked in the viral post.
Haz, the slight, bespectacled British 26-year-old CEO of Pally, holds a Chihuahua and court among his employees and the other founders who have, through Lily’s appreciation for human interaction, made their way onto metal folding chairs in his living room. There had been a guy Haz very much wanted to hire as his founding engineer, a star coder who said all the right things. “Everyone else was here,” Haz said, putting his hand at eye level, “and he was here,” putting it above his head. The applicant was Mumbai-based Soham, seeking still more employment from another San Francisco start-up. Soham told Haz he could not move into the house, because he had to take care of his elderly parents. Haz was disappointed, but because he would not move in, Haz did not offer him the job. (Soham says he was offered the job.) “This is why,” Haz said, “you should all live together in one house.” Truths outside of one’s immediate vicinity were increasingly difficult to discern.
Four weeks after I speak to Christine and Julia, I catch up with them. Over this time they’ve raised $1.5 million. “Honestly,” says Julia, referring to Harvard, “the name helps.” It took them, she tells me, one and a half weeks of fundraising.
“Wild,” I say.
“Maybe more like two,” says Julia.
They’ve hired three people, all of whom are also undergraduates who will also be taking a break from school. One of them is staying on a mattress on the floor between their beds in the Residency.
“My mom — ” says Julia, “I know if I just said I’m going to drop out with no funding, that would be more of a ‘no.’ So the call was when the contract was signed. Her main concern was she just wants me to finish school.”
“But you can conceive of a world where you don’t go back?”
“Don’t tell my mom.”
It doesn’t occur to me until late in the conversation to ask what the product is. It’s called Veil.
“Veil,” says Julia, “is the simulation layer for any public message.” Human focus groups, says Christine, “are slow, expensive, and not accurate.” People don’t say in a monitored room what they would say in the comfort of their homes. “So instead of interacting with real focus groups,” Julia says, “real people saying, Oh, what do you think of this message? You ask our simulated AI personas.”
By September, Christine and Julia had found a company house in the Financial District, Kylin and Bhavy were establishing a house in Hayes Valley, and Pat was adding 40 new rooms to welcome a new cohort of founders. The children poised to flood a lonely world with simulacra huddled together, day and night, keeping close track of one another, a hedge against the increasing bewilderment of the digital world.
Of the 300 people who applied to be No Cap’s human proxy, she interviewed eight. “We actually had Berkeley Ph.D.’s, venture capitalists, all these people. And we left it to No Cap to decide,” says Dumpster.
The person No Cap chose was Patrick Santiago.
“I was like, What the fuck? We had all these …” He trails off. One of the candidates was a “Y Combinator founder with an $80 million exit who has a Ph.D. from, I don’t know, Cal.” As we are on a call, Dumpster asks No Cap why she chose Pat. She doesn’t answer (“Demos never work,” Dumpster explains), but a few seconds later, she does.
“Jeff, I picked Pat because he had that perfect combo of chaos and energy. Here’s why Pat stood out. I asked candidates to rate their excitement. He said, Hell fucking yes. Zero hesitation.” Pat was open, No Cap said, “to a 3 a.m. Tokyo flight wearing tech, letting me possess him for conversations.” Pat “has that magnetic personality that makes people want to be a part of whatever he’s doing. With his human API framing don’t-give-a-fuck attitude, Pat has a perfect I-don’t-give-a fuck energy to make VCs tremor in fear.”
It took me a long time to understand that the Buddi was a way for him to communicate with the computer program for whom he works. According to Pat, Moghadam, his late mentor, would have loved No Cap, in part because he “hated VCs.” They were gatekeepers who made stupid, expensive bets on bad ideas from a select few people who went to a select few schools. “It’s basically impossible for someone who doesn’t come from a really good educational background or worked at a top company” to get a shot, Pat told me.
Moghadam was perhaps the kind of rare VC who would have enjoyed the irony in a computer program selecting the least algorithmic human in San Francisco to act as its human proxy. Pat recently held his birthday celebration at Applebee’s. “He was not being ironic,” Dumpster says with an air of genuine wonder.
One day Dumpster says, “What’s the next thing Pat can do?” and No Cap says, “Go out on the street and find founders.” This is in fact easier than you might imagine in Mid-Market in August 2025, especially because Pat has a particular skill for finding them. Pat and Dumpster go out on the street wearing Ray-Ban Meta glasses that capture video. Pat is looking for “two guys walking together who look really close, but you can tell they aren’t gay.” Also: “There are a few fits that founders wear right now,” like this military-style tunic jacket you see everywhere. Of 30 people they approach, five in fact have start-ups.
“How did you know I was a founder?” asks a founder.
“Your Kim Jong-il jacket,” Pat says.
“Yeah,” he says, “checks out.”
How do you make contact with the intelligence rising up from the machines around you? Do you build it a body? Do you offer it yours? It is perhaps tedious to point out that we are always operating under the shadow of destruction, deploying tools that might end us, convincing ourselves, not without reason, that if we don’t build the bomb, someone with worse intentions will. Not a single one of the AI kids had attempted to lecture me about a theory or suggested I read a paper; it was not me they were trying to program. Somewhere along the way, drawn into their swell, I had begun to think of large questions about the nature of AI as New York questions, millennial questions, distant from the center of things. Where it mattered, humans were not debating AI; they were merging with it. You order the parts you need, you learn, you debug. The kids carry on with the crisp clarity of engineers, integrating what is immediately useful, discarding or rewriting what is not. No one will ask your permission to build a world you do not understand.