AGI House $68M Hillsborough Mansion Serving as a Community Hub for Bay Areas Exploding AI Scene

The AGI House in the Bay Area serves as a community hub for AI startups and hosts events such as dinners, hackathons, and fireside chats. It was previously known as NeoGenesis and

AGI House $68M Hillsborough Mansion Serving as a Community Hub for Bay Area’s Exploding AI Scene

The AGI House, located in the affluent Bay Area neighborhood of Hillsborough, has become a community hub for the growing AI scene in the area. It is home to eight to ten founders and researchers who are working on various AI startups. Along with providing accommodation, the hacker house also hosts events such as hackathons, dinners, and fireside chats for local founders and VCs. The field of AI has seen millions of venture capital investments in recent months as technologists race to build the next tech giant.

Before becoming the AGI House, it was known as NeoGenesis, a tech collective started by OpenAI researcher and former Tesla senior director of AI Andrej Karpathy. The house was more party house than hacker house and was known for its lavish shindigs that could sometimes feature flying cars or horse-drawn carriages. When Karpathy transitioned back to OpenAI earlier this year, Rocky Yu, founder of the AGI House and AR startup Piki along with fellow founding members Jeremy Nixon and Tim Shi decided to center the house around AI.

Other hacker houses have popped up recently such as Genesis House in San Francisco’s Cerebral Valley and HF0, an accelerator-slash-mansion on the corner of Alamo Square Park. However, unlike other hacker houses that focus on internal activities only, the AGI House is focused on external community-building and dialogue. Its leaders organize invite-only dinner parties and fireside chats several times a month covering topics like AI’s effect on consumers or vertical software.

The AGI House’s residents work on various AI-related startups from customer support to trading tools. Candidates are often friends-of-friends referred by current residents who chat with the house’s organizers to determine fit. Occupants pay rent ranging from $2,000 to $10,000 depending on the room they occupy. Living in the AGI House comes with many benefits aside from its plentiful amenities. Its founders intermingle with top engineering talent at monthly hackathons that they can then bring on as early employees.

For the Ph.D. student Guo, who previously lived by herself near Stanford’s campus, the AGI House provides the friendship and support network needed to sustain the often stressful life of a founder. It is great to live in a community house where you are naturally connected to the AI founder community, she said. There have been high interests from investors to sponsor events, from Greylock’s GPT-4 hackathon in March to a recent fireside chat on AI applications hosted by Foundation Capital.

Despite its namesake, the AGI House’s organizers say that their mission isn’t to push towards artificial general intelligence but instead focus on democratizing access to AI technology and bringing a sense of measured optimism to the process. They aim to help humanity and society transition through this process while putting AI technology into everyone’s hands like a calculator. For now, the house’s leaders will remain focused on bringing Bay Area’s AI community together and supporting founders during these frothy times.