San Francisco's AI startups are pushing workers to grind endlessly, hinting at pressures soon hitting other sectors Not long after the terms "996" and "grindcore" entered the popular lexicon, people started telling me stories about what was happening at startups in San Francisco, ground zero for the artificial intelligence economy. There was the one about the founder who hadn't taken a weekend off in more than six months. The woman who joked that she'd given up her social life to work at a prestigious AI company. Or the employees who had started taking their shoes off in the office because, well, if you were going to be there for at least 12 hours a day, six days a week, wouldn't you rather be wearing slippers? "If you go to a cafe on a Sunday, everyone is working," says Sanju Lokuhitige, the co-founder of Mythril, a pre-seed-stage AI startup, who moved to San Francisco in November to be closer to the action.

Jack Ma, the billionaire founder of Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba, has vigorously endorsed China's grueling "996" culture, or working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week. But now he has an even bolder vision for the future of work thanks to artificial intelligence: the 12-hour workweek. In the future, people may end up working only three days a week, with only four hours of work per day, Ma said at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on Thursday, according to Bloomberg News. In Ma's view, the development of AI could free humanity to partake in activities other than work, with the entrepreneur comparing AI with the advent of electricity. "The power of electricity is that we make people more time so that you can go to karaoke or dancing party in the evening. I think because of artificial intelligence, people will have more time enjoying being human beings," he said, Bloomberg reported.