San Francisco, AI capital of the world, is an economic laggard

godelski

https://archive.is/xSv3M

mbgerring

Weird, I thought AI was going to create so much economic surplus that we wouldn’t know what to do with it. What happened?

compounding_it

How I see SF : I have 200mn dollar worth of shares of an AI company. I’ll buy it from you for 200mn worth of shares of an ad agency. We both would however need to turn these ‘assets’ into cash from banks to buy groceries. The banks don’t rate these very highly. So we are worth maybe 5mn if we consider book value.

boc

Anybody who has tried to rent an apartment in SF in the past 6 months knows that the city is rebounding fast - avg rents are skyrocketing again and there are lines out the door for 1/2bds. People are locked-in to their covid specials that they outgrew, but can't afford to leave. I watched some friends offer to pay 12 months of rent up-front in cash for a place and still got outbid by another offer. I honestly disagree with this article - it seems to be conflating "economic activity" with extremely high-end real estate sales data in certain neighborhoods. The city feels much more alive in the past 12 months than it was previously, and there is a lot more energy and public events. If there's anything specific to complain about, it's that the AI boom has led to the 996+ crowd staying inside and not contributing much to the local scene, but honestly that's probably fine with everyone involved.