Here’s What I Saw at an AI Hackathon

I went to an AI hackathon and saw God. Well, an AI-generated version of God, anyway. 

It was a version of GPT-3 cosplaying as a deity and rigged to conduct a real-time verbal conversation. A projector displayed a visualization of it on a screen, and it could listen to your questions and respond with a god-like verbal inflection and tone. The program’s aim was to get you to commit to using AI for benevolent purposes, and it was about as impressive a demo for a weekend hack project as I’ve ever seen.

In his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil wrote: “It is in the nature of exponential growth that events develop extremely slowly for extremely long periods of time, but as one glides through the knee of the curve, events erupt at an increasingly furious pace. And that is what we will experience as we enter the twenty-first century.”

Kurzweil is looking mighty prescient these days. That's why I ended up at this hackathon in the first place: I wanted to witness what it felt like to be there as we entered the knee of the curve. 

So I did something I’ve never done before for an Every article: I traveled to San Francisco to see what I could first hand, at AI Hack Week—an AI hackathon put on by my friend Dave Fontenot of HF0. (Dave is also an Every investor through his fund Backend Capital. Evan went too—his column on this is coming later this week.) They rented out a mansion in Alamo Square, and a bunch of programmers spent a week building projects to try to show what’s possible with this new technology wave. 

Here’s a report of everything that I saw.

Setting the scene

I got there on Sunday, the day of the demos. Everyone had been hacking in the house—a three-story Victorian mansion—for a week. I arrived a few hours before the demos started, and  the whole place was filled with the taut energy of a high-school gym in the final 10 minutes of the SATs.