The 20-Somethings Are Swarming San Francisco's AI Boom

Mr. Brendan Foody had just finished his sophomore year at Georgetown University in 2023 when he dropped out to jump into the artificial intelligence (AI) fray in San Francisco.

- Natalie Rocha

SAN FRANCISCO - Mr. Brendan Foody had just finished his sophomore year at Georgetown University in 2023 when he dropped out to jump into the artificial intelligence (AI) fray in San Francisco.

Mr. Karun Kaushik dropped out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that year to move to California after constructing an AI tool in his dorm room. And Mr. Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, who was traveling around the world after high school, had the same idea in 2022.

Now Mr. Foody, 22, Mr. Kaushik, 21, and Mr. Carmichael-Jack, 23, are each running AI start-ups within a 30-minute walk of one another in San Francisco. They have raised millions of dollars for their businesses and are supervising dozens of employees. They all have a dream that their companies will make it big.

"When ChatGPT came out, it was so clear to me that this is obviously going to be a paradigm shift," said Mr. Carmichael-Jack, chief executive of Artisan, which makes an AI sales assistant and has raised more than US$35 million (S$45 million) in funding. "I knew I wanted to be involved in that."

The entrepreneurs are part of a fast-growing cohort of CEOs in their 20s who have flocked to San Francisco's AI boom.

Among others, there are also Mr. Scott Wu, 28, of Cognition AI, which makes a software coding assistant; Mr. Michael Truell, 24, of Cursor, which sells an AI code editor; and Mr. Roy Lee, 21, of Cluely, an AI software start-up. Perhaps the most prominent is Mr. Alexandr Wang, 28, who led the start-up Scale AI before Meta tapped him in June to run its new superintelligence lab.

Their growing ranks have injected a dose of youthful elan to the AI frenzy, which has been dominated by long-time tech giants like Google and Nvidia and decade-old start-ups like OpenAI.