It seems that "Hacker Houses" are a thing in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Someone who hit the tech lottery sets one or more houses that function as group homes for coders.
The residents go to work, and to blow off steam, they sexually harass and sexually assault women at their parties.
We already knew that they were self entitled misogynous assholes.
Packing them in like sardines and throwing money at parties in an attempt to keep the residents working is a petri dish for sexual misconduct.
The eight-bedroom Mediterranean-style mansion, which borders a golf course in the wealthy Silicon Valley town of Hillsborough, Calif., has gone through a lot in recent years.
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The mansion is one of the most prominent — and notorious — tech group homes, which have proliferated across Silicon Valley and San Francisco amid the artificial intelligence boom. Long gone are the fraternity-style rental homes popularized by Mark Zuckerberg in the early days of Facebook, where grungy engineers coded all day and crammed into shared rooms at night.
Today these so-called hacker houses are driven by missions, like the advancement of humanity, and have become critical nodes for the A.I. industry. Residents are often start-up founders or engineers working at OpenAI or Anthropic. Rent can hit $10,000 a month for a room.
But what has unfolded in them has sometimes gone far beyond socializing and networking. Some houses have become the sites for sexual harassment cases and rape allegations, as well as infighting among residents, according to previously unreported police reports obtained by The New York Times, court records and more than 20 people in the A.I. industry.
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At the mansion in Hillsborough known as AGI House — named for “artificial general intelligence,” a technology that can match the powers of the human mind — the local police have logged 37 incidents since 2022. At least 17 were related to complaints about large parties and events, according to the reports.
The others included an episode in December when a woman called the police and told them that a male AGI House resident had pressured her to have sex; she climbed over a gate to escape. Last year, the police were also asked at least four times to perform welfare checks, which typically happen when people experience mental health issues or are considered unsafe to themselves or others.………
Some of the industry’s biggest names are involved. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, has advised the Residency, which aims to be a global network of hacker houses for “ambitious builders” to live and work.
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Sofie Bukovska, 26, who works at the A.I. film production company Trippy Pictures, moved into AGI House last year for a few months and said she had quickly realized how helpful it was to her career. She met A.I. executives and personalities, including Grimes, whom she probably wouldn’t have otherwise, she said.
The atmosphere “was something very different from normal life,” Ms. Bukovska said.
Rocky Yu, a venture capitalist who has managed AGI House since 2023, has tried to curb the partying, he has claimed in court documents. Reached by phone, he said he was not aware of any police reports and declined to answer questions.
The mansion, which is connected to a venture capital fund, is backed by Eric Schmidt, the former Google chief executive, and Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist, according to its website. A representative for Mr. Andreessen said he was not involved.
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The 18,000-square-foot property has become such a center of gravity for the A.I. industry that Mr. Yu and a former manager are embroiled in a court battle over who owns the rights to the AGI House brand. The home has become emblematic of the behind-the-scenes issues — often not publicly discussed — that group houses face.………
AGI House’s roots trace back to Jeremy Nixon, 33, a former Google researcher who established other tech group homes before the A.I. boom. One that he co-founded around 2019 at a five-bedroom house in San Francisco was called Genesis.
………Yehong Zhu, 30, who is not related to Mr. Zhu, filed a police report accusing a former Genesis house member of rape and assault in December 2021, according to a copy of the report. She has lived in four tech houses and initially viewed them almost as utopias where she could quickly meet other entrepreneurs, she said, before seeing a darker side.
Ms. Zhu’s case remains under investigation. The Genesis resident she accused has left the house and cannot be located, she said.
“I’m far from the only one this has happened to,” said Ms. Zhu, the founder of an A.I. start-up called Zette.
It appears that tech frat boys are even worse than the ordinary kind of frat boys.
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