it feels so narratively incongruous that san francisco would become the center for the most ambitious, and the likely future birthplace of agi.
san francisco feels like a city that wants to pretend to be a small quaint hippie town forever. it’s a small splattering of civilization dropped amid a vast expanse of beautiful nature. frozen in amber, it’s unclear if time even passes here—the lack of seasons makes it feel like a summer that never quite ended. after 9pm, everything closes and everyone goes to bed. and the dysfunction of the city government is never too far away, constantly reminding you of humanity’s follies next to the perfection of nature.
on the other hand, nyc feels like the city. everything is happening right here, right now. all the money in the world flows through this one place. it’s gritty and yet majestic at the same time. the most ambitious people in the world came here to build their fortunes, and live on in the names on the skyscrapers everywhere that house the employees who continue to keep their companies running. they are part of a surroundings that is entirely constructed by man—even the bits of nature are curated and parcelled out in manageable units. it feels like the kind of place that can only be built by endless unchecked ambition.
idk. it just feels kinda weird to me that all the most ambitious people who want to build god are going to the little hippie town, and not the big city. and most of them seem to just treat SF as a place that is close to work and has good weather and don’t really care about or try to match the vibe, to the great consternation of the locals. also, for a city that attracts people who love to build things, SF doesn’t seem to do an awful lot of building...
(tbc, this is not the only vibe of nyc. nyc is such a big place that it’s impossible to summarize as one vibe. but this is a huge central part of the vibe in a way that just doesn’t seem to match sf.)
Cali is the place to be for technology because Cali was the defense contractor hub, with the U.S. Navy choosing the bay area as its center for R&D during WWII and the Cold War. The hippie reputation came a lot later, after its status as the primary place to work in IT was thoroughly cemented, with both established infrastructure and the network effect keeping it that way.
But NYC is for ambitious conformists like bankers and lawyers. From that perspective there is no point in making a fortune in SF if your social circle does not appreciate your expensive Armani suit or your excellent taste in business cards. At least that’s my vibes, I haven’t been in over 15 years.
Narratively I’d pick Shenzhen. Scrappy little fishing village that transformed itself into a high tech hub seems suitable for building AGI.
sf is the relatively much younger city, and radically reinvented itself as few as 60 years ago. by that metaphor, i am not surprised that its ideas smell more fresh.
No love for New England? We’ve got good education and a solid base of tech companies.
An alternative narrative is that AGI is the product of a long slow slog of research into computational neuroscience. In this scenario the ambitious ppl in NYC and Cali refuse to research the right stuff because the rewards are too far off. And here is where I see New England as having good vibes, for working on basic research that has no immediate applications.
it feels so narratively incongruous that san francisco would become the center for the most ambitious, and the likely future birthplace of agi.
san francisco feels like a city that wants to pretend to be a small quaint hippie town forever. it’s a small splattering of civilization dropped amid a vast expanse of beautiful nature. frozen in amber, it’s unclear if time even passes here—the lack of seasons makes it feel like a summer that never quite ended. after 9pm, everything closes and everyone goes to bed. and the dysfunction of the city government is never too far away, constantly reminding you of humanity’s follies next to the perfection of nature.
on the other hand, nyc feels like the city. everything is happening right here, right now. all the money in the world flows through this one place. it’s gritty and yet majestic at the same time. the most ambitious people in the world came here to build their fortunes, and live on in the names on the skyscrapers everywhere that house the employees who continue to keep their companies running. they are part of a surroundings that is entirely constructed by man—even the bits of nature are curated and parcelled out in manageable units. it feels like the kind of place that can only be built by endless unchecked ambition.
idk. it just feels kinda weird to me that all the most ambitious people who want to build god are going to the little hippie town, and not the big city. and most of them seem to just treat SF as a place that is close to work and has good weather and don’t really care about or try to match the vibe, to the great consternation of the locals. also, for a city that attracts people who love to build things, SF doesn’t seem to do an awful lot of building...
(tbc, this is not the only vibe of nyc. nyc is such a big place that it’s impossible to summarize as one vibe. but this is a huge central part of the vibe in a way that just doesn’t seem to match sf.)
Cali is the place to be for technology because Cali was the defense contractor hub, with the U.S. Navy choosing the bay area as its center for R&D during WWII and the Cold War. The hippie reputation came a lot later, after its status as the primary place to work in IT was thoroughly cemented, with both established infrastructure and the network effect keeping it that way.
HP, for instance, was founded in 1938.
It’s not just SF but the SF Bay Area (Google, Nvidia, Meta etc), which is bigger and has more varied vibes than just SF.
But NYC is for ambitious conformists like bankers and lawyers. From that perspective there is no point in making a fortune in SF if your social circle does not appreciate your expensive Armani suit or your excellent taste in business cards. At least that’s my vibes, I haven’t been in over 15 years.
Narratively I’d pick Shenzhen. Scrappy little fishing village that transformed itself into a high tech hub seems suitable for building AGI.
sf is the relatively much younger city, and radically reinvented itself as few as 60 years ago. by that metaphor, i am not surprised that its ideas smell more fresh.
No love for New England? We’ve got good education and a solid base of tech companies.
An alternative narrative is that AGI is the product of a long slow slog of research into computational neuroscience. In this scenario the ambitious ppl in NYC and Cali refuse to research the right stuff because the rewards are too far off. And here is where I see New England as having good vibes, for working on basic research that has no immediate applications.