San Francisco's brightest minds are stuffing themselves into hacker houses. The living room of the Accler8 hacker house in San Francisco, where the author stayed for a week. O n a Friday in April, I hopped into an Uber to a fish market in San Francisco with a couple of tech founders on a mission to buy lobsters. Not for dinner, but for science: The duo dreamed of one day altering human consciousness, but they would start by toying around with some crustaceans. They intended to perform neurosurgery on the lobsters in the hopes of controlling them with an AI bot. Leading the way was Elliot Roth, a bearded 32-year-old wearing a black T-shirt with Longevity printed across the chest and a silver chain with a double-helix pendant. To push the boundaries of the five senses, Roth has implanted a magnet in his left ring finger.

On a Wednesday morning last month, I thought, just for a second, that AI was going to kill me. I had hailed a self-driving Waymo to bring me to a hacker house in Nob Hill, San Francisco. Just a few blocks from arrival, the car lurched toward the other lane--which was, thankfully, empty--and immediately jerked back. That sense of peril felt right for the moment. As I stepped into the cab, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell was delivering a speech criticizing President Donald Trump's economic policies, and in particular the administration's sweeping on-again, off-again tariffs. A day earlier, the White House had claimed that Chinese goods would be subject to overall levies as high as 245 percent when accounting for preexisting tariffs, and the AI giant Nvidia's stock had plummeted after the company reported that it expected to take a quarterly hit of more than 5 billion for selling to China.

The techies are at it again--only this time, they're not looking for kombucha on tap or Patagonia vests, but all-inclusive "hacker houses" in Hayes Valley. Artificial intelligence workers are now forming co-living and coworking communities, where like-minded founders and developers can eat, sleep and breathe their work. These communities are often operated out of historic Victorians near Alamo Square, just a stone's throw from Souvla and a Cotopaxi outlet. The hacker house craze has grown quickly in recent months, so much so that some in the industry are now calling the neighborhood around them "Cerebral Valley." With catchy community names like Genesis House (or its Hillsborough iteration, Neogenesis House) and an ethos that promises to optimize work via play, these communities might sound like just another Silicon Valley fad.

In this video, I show you a side project I've been working on. It's a program that uses "NeuroEvolution of Augmented Topologies" to solve OpenAI environments (simple games) with neural networks. By feeding observation data from game environment into my program, over time it's able to learn how to play itself. Since all of my code is open source on Github, anyone can use this to run their own simulations. Hacker House is supported by fans on Patreon.