The tech world’s potential future founders are living out hedonistic existences in giant Silicon Valley mansions, where they live with a dozen and even more like-minded individuals, and where life is more a less a constant party. These so-called hacker houses, though, have a dark side.
A recent New York Times investigation has uncovered several harassment cases and rape allegations stemming from hacker houses. The most prominent of these is the AGI House — short for “artificial general intelligence” — in Hillsborough, where police have logged 37 incidents since 2022. At least 17 were related to the often large and extravagant parties and events that were regularly being thrown on the property.
In December, a woman called the Hillsborough police station at 2 in the morning from a Lyft, reporting that she had been trapped at the AGI House by a male resident who tried to force her to have sex.
The man told her she was old and “would be alone forever,” according to the police reported viewed by the NYT. He was “persistent in attempting to convince” the woman “to have sex with him, and she repeatedly declined.”
She escaped by climbing over a gate, unharmed.
The AGI House was founded by Jeremy Nixon, a former Google researcher who’s established other tech homes, with the vision of having “20 AI hackers, living in the same epic house for three months,” he told the NYT. The domicile was originally called NeoGenesis, but rebranded after OpenAI released ChatGPT and kickstarted the AI boom. And before NeoGenesis, he co-founded a hacker house called Genesis in 2019.
Genesis had a dark history of its own. Not wanting for debauchery, it was also a hub for parties, with one 19-year-old tech entrepreneur claiming he used to sneak into parties when he was just 13. “It was pretty crazy,” he told the NYT.
Yehong Zhu, 30, filed a police reporting accusing a former Genesis house member of rape and assault in December 2021. Zhu has lived in four tech houses, and her view of them as utopic spaces for entrepreneurs was shattered by her experience. The case is still under investigation, and the accused Genesis resident hasn’t left the house and can’t be located, she said.
“I’m far from the only one this has happened to,” Zhu, who founded her own startup called Zette AI, told the NYT.
To lay out the stakes, these hacker houses aren’t random gatherings. Some are directly run by tech executives like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who has advised one called the Residency. AGI House regularly had tech industry royalty show up for dinners, including Google co-founder Sergey Brin. In a direct way, they’re responsible for fostering the culture and beliefs that the current and upcoming generations of AI industry workers, if not leaders, are being instilled with, along with building the network of connections that’ll shape their careers. The next Sam Altman or Elon Musk is probably spending their formative young adult years in one of these debaucherous dens.
The people running them are well aware of their outsized influence. The AGI House’s current manager, venture capitalist Rocky Yu, is in an ongoing legal battle with a former manager over who owns the rights to the AGI House brand, the NYT noted.
There’re other signs that all is not well behind closed doors. Police were also asked to perform welfare checks on at least four different occasions at the AGI House. On one occasion, they even sent an ambulance to the house.
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