These photos offer an intimate look at the community powering the artificial-intelligence revolution.
Photographs by Laura Morton
By Laura Morton
June 22 at 8:05 a.m.
In an opulent ballroom on a Saturday night, the classic pump-up anthem “Eye of the Tiger” blared as artificial intelligence enthusiasts tapped away on their keyboards. This was a hackathon — an event where participants have a set amount of time to collaborate on a project they present to the crowd — at a sprawling mansion about 30 minutes south of San Francisco.
As a professional freelance photographer, I’ve spent the past decade documenting the people and culture of Silicon Valley. Ever since OpenAI’s ChatGPT debuted in November 2022, countless entrepreneurs have been inspired to make their own generative AI tools. Now, nearly every new start-up has an AI element — technology that automates simple tasks, for example, or a chatbot that provides mental health tips.
In the past year and a half, entrepreneurs from around the world have flocked to San Francisco to be part of this AI revolution. Many start-up founders and their teams live and work together so they can focus intently on building their companies. And evenings like the AI hackathon I visited in March 2023 have become Silicon Valley’s idea of fun.
Here’s a peek inside that world.
Apoorva Mahajan, center, and Mo Mahmood, right, take a break for a lightsaber battle in the hardware lab at Founders Inc., a start-up incubator in San Francisco in March 2023. At the time, Mahajan was working on a brain-computer interface device and Mahmood was working at a robotics company.
Michaela Carmein, second from right, dressed as an AI robot named “Guinevere,” watches entrepreneurs’ presentations from an overflow room at an April 2023 demo day for start-up founders who have completed the selective 12-week residency Hacker Fellowship Zero. Such events, which focus on founders' technical talks, can often be stale, but Carmein's act was one of several creative flourishes.
AI entrepreneurs, including Taylor Schmidt, second from right, who's building an AI design assistant for architects and interior designers, plug away on their laptops while attending a co-working event at the San Francisco office of a venture capital firm in March 2023. Cerebral Valley, the organization hosting the event, aims to help start-up founders escape the isolating work of building a company.
Evan Stites-Clayton, left, and Dave Fontenot, right, co-founders of the start-up residency Hacker Fellowship Zero, look at photos that were used to entertain guests as they checked in at an April 2023 demo event. Volunteers asked attendees to identify the differences between similar-looking photos to prove they are humans, not robots.
Jacob Cole, center, leads others in Qigong, an ancient Chinese practice of optimizing energy within the body, mind and spirit, in the AGI House backyard during a March 2023 hackathon in Hillsborough, Calif. Through Qigong, Cole, a hackathon competitor, wanted to share “the incredible feeling of not letting the energy escape, not letting the information escape.”
Kelly Peng, the CEO and co-chief technology officer of Kura Technologies, and Yosun Chang, right, use Apple Vision Pros while they prepare to present at a robot hackathon at the Hillsborough AGI House in February 2024. That night, Peng, who lives at the house, showed off a telepresence robot, shown bottom left, that she and her team built. When paired with augmented-reality glasses, the robot can allow someone to visit a place virtually.
A volunteer at an AI meetup at a San Francisco co-working space in June 2023 holds up a number so his fellow discussion-group members know where to assemble. Attendees debated such questions as “What will humans always be better at than AI?” and “What fundamentally gives us, as individuals, meaning and purpose?”
Aqeel Ali, left, works on a project with the input of Kevin Baragona at the office of Exa, an AI-powered search engine start-up, in San Francisco in September 2023. The start-up — whose members live and work together in an apartment above another start-up — invited their friends to a Saturday night coding party. The vibe resembled a club plus co-working space: Electronic music played and housemates whipped up mac and cheese as they worked into the early-morning hours.
Tammie Siew, left, a partner at the venture capital firm Pebblebed, stands to play an icebreaker game at a February 2023 networking lunch for women in AI at Pebblebed’s office in San Francisco’s Mission District. According to the World Economic Forum, only 22 percent of AI professionals globally are women.
Alex Reibman, left, and Jesse Hu, right, face off in a prompt battle with venture capitalist Alessio Fanelli, center, refereeing at an AI networking event in June 2023. It was a sort of 21st-century World’s Fair, with attendees perusing a showcase of AI start-ups and then watching a prompt battle where competitors entered strings of words to get AI software to generate images.
An individual dressed as the “hugging face” emoji dances at an event billed as the “Woodstock of AI,” where thousands of people gathered at the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco in March 2023. Earlier, the CEO of Hugging Face, a company that develops tools for building applications using machine learning, spoke about open-source AI development. AI builders demonstrated what they are working on. Later, when the crowd dissipated, there was finally room to dance.
Participants work (and nap) at a 24-hour hackathon at a co-working space in the San Francisco Ferry Building in March 2023. The winners included a project to help prevent AI from being used for spam calls, a tool to help kids learn to read and a platform for therapists to improve mental health care. A year later, the AI boom is still going strong, with some weekends offering multiple hackathons for entrepreneurs to choose from.
About this story
To capture these photos, Laura Morton was invited into events hosted by the AGI House, Hacker Fellowship Zero, Cerebral Valley, Internet Activism, Decibel, Latent Space, the GAI Collective; the live-work offices of Exa and Brev. Dev; the offices of Blumberg Capital, Pebblebed and Founders Inc.; the co-working spaces Werqwise and SHACK15.The photography for this article was supported by a grant from the Pierre and Alexandra Boulat Association.
Design and development by Michael Domine. Photo Editing by Monique Woo. Editing by Lisa Bonos and Karly Domb Sadof. Design editing by Betty Chavarria.
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