HF0, or Hacker Fellowship Zero, is a start-up accelerator that provides 12-week residencies for batches of fellows from 10 different start-ups. Their experience, which culminates in a demonstration day, is supposed to be the most productive three months of the fellows’ lives. Dave Fontenot, one of HF0’s founders, was inspired by the two years he spent living in monasteries in his 20s: While monastery life was materially ascetic, he found that it was luxurious in the freedom it gave residents to focus on the things that really mattered. And this year at the Archbishop’s Mansion in San Francisco, the home of the fellows, almost everyone has been monastically focused on what has become the city’s newest religion: artificial intelligence.
The A.I. gospel had not yet spread in 2021, when Fontenot and his two co-founders, Emily Liu and Evan Stites-Clayton, started the accelerator. Even a year ago, when HF0 hosted a batch of fellows at a hotel in Miami, six out of the eight companies represented were cryptocurrency start-ups. But at the mansion in San Francisco, eight of the 10 companies in HF0’s first batch this year were working on A.I.-based apps.
That generative A.I. has largely supplanted crypto in the eyes of founders and venture capitalists alike is not exactly surprising. When OpenAI released ChatGPT late last year, it set off a new craze at a time when the collapsing crypto and tech markets had left many investors and would-be entrepreneurs adrift, unsure of where to put their capital and time. Suddenly users everywhere were realizing that A.I. could now respond to verbal queries with a startling degree of humanlike fluency. “Large language models have been around for a long time, but their uses were limited,” said Robert Nishihara, a co-founder of Anyscale, a start-up for machine-learning infrastructure. “But there’s a threshold where they become dramatically more useful, and I think now it’s crossed that.”
This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.
The Evolving Danger of the New Bird Flu
Sunday Special: 'Modern Love'
The Supreme Court Takes Up Homelessness
The Opening Days of Trump’s First Criminal Trial
Are ‘Forever Chemicals’ a Forever Problem?
A.I.’s Original Sin
Iran’s Unprecedented Attack on Israel
The Sunday Read: ‘What I Saw Working at The National Enquirer During Donald Trump’s Rise’
How One Family Lost $900,000 in a Timeshare Scam
The Staggering Success of Trump’s Trial Delay Tactics
Trump's Abortion Dilemma
How Tesla Planted the Seeds for Its Own Potential Downfall
The Eclipse Chaser
The Sunday Read: ‘What Deathbed Visions Teach Us About Living’
An Engineering Experiment to Cool the Earth
Israel’s Deadly Airstrike on the World Central Kitchen
The Accidental Tax Cutter in Chief
Kids Are Missing School at an Alarming Rate
Ronna McDaniel, TV News and the Trump Problem
From Serial: Season 4 - Guantánamo
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Up First
Today, Explained
Matter of Opinion
NPR News Now
Pivot