OpenAI head says SF is ‘the best place to start an AI company’

At an invitation-only conference hosted by Goldman Sachs and venture capital firm Silicon Valley Angel, hundreds of attendees packed into a glamorous ballroom to hear from AI’s biggest names.

“I think SF is by far the best place to start an AI company,” said Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, whose San Francisco-based company developed the ubiquitous ChatGPT chatbot. . “But it could be 10 or 100 times better.”

The city is seen as succeeding “more than because of policies,” including its failures over homelessness and questions about whether it’s pro-business, he said.

“It’s possible to truly make the best place imaginable possible,” said Brockman.

Besides OpenAI, San Francisco is also home to Scale AI, which has a market cap of $7.3 billion, although the company cut 20% of its workforce earlier this year, and Anthropic and Dialpad, which each raised hundreds of millions of dollars.

At the conference, Mayor London Breed praised the resilience of the industry and the city, declaring San Francisco to be rising like a phoenix as the “AI capital of the world,” likening it to a gold rush.

“We have some of the most outstanding and innovative investors. We have incredible talent,” she said. “We bring together everyone with a creative spirit.”

She also said it’s time to rethink downtown San Francisco to encourage more innovation and more diverse uses, and even speculated on putting a soccer field near Moscone Center. (There are no formal plans to do so.)

“We look forward to building a very close relationship,” she said in a room of hundreds of business leaders. “Don’t let others tell you what San Francisco is. Learn from your own experience.”

Ron Conway, an influential venture capitalist and political power broker who co-organized the conference, said he remained bullish about the region remaining the world’s tech capital.

“The Bay Area and San Francisco are going to become more and more important for technology. And you’re sitting at the epicenter of these founders,” he said in an interview.

Some economists aren’t sure whether AI will boost jobs in San Francisco. San Francisco’s percentage of AI jobs fell between 2020 and 2022, according to a metric of job postings by ZipRecruiter.

The city has bounced back from past crises, including the dot-com crash in the 2000s and the 2008 recession, he said.

“We have to do a lot of things in parallel. And we’ve done this before, we just have to do it again,” he said.

Conway also expressed confidence that employees will return to the office and find themselves out of a job due to remote work, which is taking a toll on the San Francisco office market. Nearly one-third of his space in the city is available for lease or sublease, with more vacancies expected as leases expire.

“Once people get back together, they love it.