San Francisco · AI Agent · The Atlantic Technology
The New (And Slightly Smelly) Center of the AI Boom
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On a Friday in April, the reporter hopped into an Uber to a fish market in San Francisco with a couple of tech founders on a mission to buy lobsters.
Key facts
- Nearly two-thirds of the world’s AI-start-up investment, some $120 billion last year alone, is made in the Bay Area
- The house where the reporter stayed was hardly luxurious, but it was still a major step up from Accelr8’s original location, which had 15 bedrooms and a single kitchen for $1,500 a month
- And then there was Daniel Morgan, a 30-year-old Texan who lived in the room below mine
- Morgan co-founded the Accelr8 hacker house with his friend Patrick Santiago in 2024, and it’s a sort of start-up in its own right
Summary
Leading the way was Elliot Roth, a bearded 32-year-old wearing a black T-shirt with Longevity printed across the chest and a silver chain with a double-helix pendant. Roth did not have any experience with lobster surgery, so he had enlisted a co-conspirator: William Joy, a lanky, 19-year-old redhead who also had never operated on a lobster but seemed confident in his fine motor skills. “I’m pretty sure it’s going to be the first real instance of a complex AI agent interfacing with a biological organism,” he said during the ride. With two lobsters secured in a pink plastic bag, they returned to an office building in downtown San Francisco where Roth and Joy would conduct the experiment. They began setting up an aquarium tank, fiddling with the water’s salinity and acidity.
This experiment was eccentric but not outlandish—at least not to Roth and Joy’s housemates.