In San Francisco, the AI boom is creating fame, fortune — and existential dread.
As rapid technological development widens the gap between the haves and the have-nots, a sort of machine-age ennui has set across San Francisco, says Deedy Das, a partner at venture capital firm Menlo Ventures.
Das said in a post on X, which had almost a thousand responses by Sunday afternoon, that over the past five years, the fortunes of a small group of employees at leading AI companies, like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Nvidia, as well as some smaller startups, have “skyrocketed.”
Money, however, it seems, really doesn’t always buy happiness.
Those who’ve made it feel a “profound” lack of purpose, Das wrote, as some of them watch their wealth multiply from less than $150,000 to over $50 million in a matter of years.
“It flips your life plans upside down.”
Many, he said, are hitting that threshold young, long before they expected to be financially set. He recalled asking one founder why they didn’t simply sell their company. The founder’s response: If they sold, they would have money — but lose the attention and relevance that came with always building.
The under-$500,000 bourgeoisie, meanwhile, feel like they’re on a path with no end, Das wrote. As layoffs ripple through the industry — most recently at Cloudflare and Coinbase, which both cited AI as a reason for the cuts — once lucrative roles are fading away. “Many software engineers feel like their life’s skill is no longer useful,” he said.
Middle managers, too, are unhappy, Das wrote, as another wave of the “Great Flattening” rears its head. “They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies.”
Instead, people are racked by a new kind of existential dread, Das said. “Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?” he wrote.
This other half has a name, too: Several users in the replies called it a “permanent underclass.”
One possible solution: Move to New York. New York City-based tech blogger Packy McCormick, responding to Das on X on Saturday, said that amid 70-degree, sunny weather in New York City, he was heading to a kite festival.
“I haven’t heard the words ‘agent’ or ‘token’ once all morning,” McCormick wrote. “Greatest city in the world.”
In the end, everything is relative. Das said that it can be easy to scoff at the “champagne problems of the valley.”
One user in the replies summed it up: “May you get everything you want quickly and with little effort,” they wrote. “An old curse.”
