A Day at the Center of the AI Boom

San Francisco's climate always makes me feel like I have a fever. It's warm and pleasant in the sun, but if you have the misfortune of walking into the shadow of a building you're suddenly shivering like you've got the flu. So I've come to follow a singular rule for visiting the tech capital of the world: 

Layer up.

Once you have wrapped yourself to the gills in Patagonia paraphernalia, as I now do, you can truly experience the city—its delights, terrors, and idiosyncrasies.

The East Coast jet lag means you can wake up easily at 6 a.m. You can take a Lyft to Sightglass coffee, where the air is redolent with the smell of beans roasted by master coffee makers. You can drink your latte in the rose-colored San Francisco morning as a cable car trundles by. You can’t walk around; you’re not sure if SOMA is dangerous at this hour.

You can experience the electric atmosphere at OpenAI Dev Day, hob-nob with the celebrities of your field, get excited about the future, and do off-the-cuff food reviews. You can jump at the chance to get a gray OpenAI sweater size medium as an extra buffer against the vicissitudes of the city’s mercurial clime.

You can visit the Archimedes Banya, where men and women roam naked together between saunas, steam rooms, hot tubs, and cold tubs. You can listen to the owner, completely derobed, explain that the sauna you are sitting in is the best in the world. You can sit, wearing a bathing suit, as New Yorkers do, on a hot cedar bench and marvel at the hidden complexities of sauna design, of the skill it requires to balance the contrasting forces of temperature and humidity. You can find that another person sitting next to you in the sauna, as naked and unashamed as Adam before the fall, is someone who you have followed on Twitter for 10 years. You can say hello, and ask how he is.

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You can be invited to dinner in a private room at a sushi restaurant. You can muse aloud between bites of uni about ideas for ChatGPT posts you want to write and projects you want to build. You can get feedback from people who have forgotten more about machine learning and business building than you will ever know. You can leave dinner feeling like you cannot wait to get home and write.

You can instead find yourself at a house party. You can lovingly admire the large bookshelf on display, relieved that even in the center of our techno-utopian AI-enabled future, people still love books.