In San Francisco, the AI boom is creating fame, fortune, and existential fear.
As rapid technological advances widen the gap between the haves and have-nots, a kind of machine-age ennui atmosphere is spreading across San Francisco, said Dee Dee Das, a partner at venture capital firm Menlo Ventures.
In a post on X that had about 1,000 responses by Sunday afternoon, Das said that over the past five years, the fortunes of a small number of employees at major AI companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI, and Nvidia, as well as several smaller startups, have “skyrocketed.”
However, in reality, money does not necessarily buy happiness.
Das writes that people who feel a “severe” lack of purpose in this sort of thing have seen their wealth grow from less than $150,000 to more than $50 million in a matter of years.
“It upends your life plans.”
He said many people reach that threshold at a young age, long before they expect to be financially stable. He recalled asking one founder why he didn’t simply sell the company. Here’s the founder’s answer: If you sell, you’ll make money, but you’ll lose the attention and relevance that comes from constantly building.
Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie with less than $500,000 feels like they are on a never-ending road, Das wrote. Layoffs ripple through the industry More recently, Cloudflare and Coinbase have both cited AI as a reason for layoffs, but the lucrative role is disappearing. “Many software engineers feel that their life skills are no longer useful,” he said.
Das wrote that middle managers are also dissatisfied as a new wave of the “Great Flattening” hits. “They’re seeing the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies.”
Instead, Das says, people are being plagued by a new kind of existential fear. “Is this the right place? Should I move? Is there still time? Will we make it?” he wrote.
This other half also has a name, with some users calling it the “permanent underclass” in replies.
One possible solution is to move to New York. New York City-based technology blogger Packy McCormick told Das on X on Saturday that he was heading to a kite festival in 70-degree weather in New York City.
“I haven’t heard the words ‘agent’ or ‘token’ once all morning,” McCormick wrote. “The greatest city in the world.”
At the end of the day, everything is relative. Mr Das said it was easy to ridicule the “Valley Champagne problem”.
One user in a reply summed it up: “May you get what you want quickly and with little effort.” “It’s an old curse.”