• Teddy Liaw is a tech CEO who left San Francisco in 2021 to move to a suburb of Las Vegas.
• Liaw was frustrated with crime in the Bay Area and wanted a family-friendly and vibrant city.
• Since moving there, Liaw says his mission has been to introduce others to everything Vegas has to offer.

This essay is based on a conversation with Teddy Liaw, the 45-year-old CEO of contact center solutions company NexRep, who moved from San Francisco to Summerlin, Nevada, a suburb of Las Vegas, in 2021 after becoming frustrated with crime in the Bay Area. Liaw founded the Vegas Tech Summit, a multi-day tech conference that promotes Vegas as an emerging tech hub.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I absolutely loved the Bay Area. I loved the culture, the food, the people, the intellect, and the gorgeous water views that surround this amazing city.

But COVID-19 has completely devastated the city. It's not the same San Francisco it once was. The city is still recovering, but it's not fully back on the mend yet.

I had lived in San Francisco for about 15 years before I moved. I owned a condo at the top of the hill with a beautiful view of the bay.

The Bay Area had so much to offer, including a thriving entrepreneurial and technology ecosystem that made very smart people even smarter.

But during the pandemic, there was rampant crime. I don't appreciate people making this a homeless problem, because San Francisco has had homeless people before and they've found ways to provide help. That's been the narrative during COVID. But it's not a homeless problem. It was a safety problem.

At the end of 2020, my house was robbed. My experience with the police was not positive. That was the last straw.

I have two young children and I asked myself: is this the kind of environment where my family will be safe? The answer was unfortunately no.

Everywhere on the table

I considered Los Angeles, Washington State and Texas.

In January 2021, in the midst of the COVID pandemic, I decided to take an exploratory trip to Vegas. It opened my eyes to what Vegas had to offer, including new homes, clean living, and ample playgrounds for children.

There was amazing food of all ethnicities, cuisines and cultures. Vegas offers entertainment, family life and suburban living, just 20 minutes away from all the social opportunities you could want.

It was a very easy decision.

Summerlin is a suburb about 20 minutes outside of Las Vegas. halbergman/Getty Images

Summerlin is a planned community about 20 minutes from all the action. You can't walk more than a half mile without coming across a park. We're in a desert, but there's plenty of greenery.

Designed for families, Summerlin offers an amazing selection of schools from kindergarten through high school, including some of the best private schools in the state.

I also love playing golf and there are so many opportunities to play golf.

I got nearly 7,000 square feet and two swimming pools for the same price as my four-bedroom apartment in the Bay Area. I needed a house that my friends would want to visit.

As soon as I moved, I started inviting friends to visit me. Many of them ended up being blown away by what Vegas had to offer. I convinced many of my friends to move. There's a whole wave of people I “imported” from California.

Everyone always worries about the 100 degree heat, but in just 35 minutes you can get to Mount Charleston and it's only 80 degrees. Yes, we're in a desert, but we can drive 35 minutes and go sledding in the winter.

Honestly, Vegas has more to offer in terms of quality of life than it should have.

Vegas is well on its way to becoming a thriving tech ecosystem

There's nothing better to work in than the Bay Area. It offered unexpected opportunities. Back then, you could hop in an Uber, sit down with the vice president of a tech company and have a great 20-minute conversation. Or you could sit in a restaurant and overhear the conversation of the executive next to you. That was the spirit of San Francisco.

The magic of the Bay Area hasn't quite made it to Vegas yet, but it will.

When I came to Vegas, I began meeting with public officials and was appointed to the previous governor's Startup and Venture Council.

I later founded a nonprofit called Vegas Tech Summit. It already attracts successful entrepreneurs and tech people from across the country who come to see what Vegas has to offer.

My goal is to get people to realize that Vegas has the potential to be a thriving tech ecosystem and we are well on our way to achieving that. I see a lot of VCs and entrepreneurs already moving here.

The last thing I miss here is an existing circle of friends. There is no replacing friendships that have lasted for decades. But I have noticed that so many new people are moving here and everyone is keen to meet nice people and build a community.

That's the spirit of Vegas.

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Marc Benioff, chief executive officer of Salesforce Inc., said he pushed San Francisco officials to clean up the city before his company's annual conference began in his hometown this week and was pleased with the results.

“We put a lot of pressure on the city this year,” Benioff said during a press event Wednesday. “This looks great. It's very safe at the moment. We're moving in the right direction.”

Benioff caused a stir last month when he said that Dreamforce, San Francisco's largest convention, could leave the city if the event's attendees experienced homelessness and drug use.

“Nobody liked that — I didn’t like saying it,” Benioff said of his threat during a separate event Wednesday on stage with California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

“We're coming after you, we want to keep you here,” Newsom said after Benioff noted that the city this week was the cleanest he'd ever seen.

About 43,000 people are expected to participate in Dreamforce, which will generate nearly $90 million for the city, a Salesforce spokesperson said, citing data from the San Francisco Travel Association. The conference is scheduled to end on Thursday.

Moving Salesforce's flagship annual meeting out of the city would be another blow to the region's tourism economy after major events hosted by Oracle Corp. and Google's cloud division were relocated from Alphabet Inc. According to the San Francisco Travel Association, conference spending remains well below pandemic levels — falling to $587 million in 2022 after generating nearly $2 billion in 2019.

The association estimates that convention-related hotel room nights will decline 34% in 2024 compared to this year. Overall visitor spending recovered faster and is expected to reach 88% of pre-pandemic levels this year.

Although Benioff was pleased with how this year went, he did not respond to a press question about whether Dreamforce would be back in San Francisco in 2024, saying city officials still had more work to do. “Homelessness remains a major problem in our city,” Benioff said, adding that more housing is needed and more police officers should be hired.

“It is an ongoing effort to increase the visibility of police and community ambassadors in key tourist areas,” said a spokesperson for Mayor London Breed’s office. “San Francisco is committed to making Dreamforce a world-class event, as we do year after year.”

Salesforce officials said there had been no reports of security incidents related to homelessness or drug use among conference attendees as of Wednesday afternoon. A spokesman for the San Francisco Police Department said there were no such incidents at last year's Dreamforce event.

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For decades, hordes of business titans have flocked to San Francisco every year for Salesforce's main conference – but that could be changing.

Marc Benioff, CEO of the customer management platform provider, warned that this year's Dreamforce conference could be the last to be held in the Golden City.

Dreamforce has been a major draw for the region since its inception two decades ago – about 40,000 people are expected to come to the Moscone Center for the two-day event, which begins Sept. 12.

The event program is top-notch: speakers include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Stanford computer science professor Fei-Fei Li, as well as celebrities like Matthew McConaughey, The Office's Rainn Wilson, and Oscar-winning director Spike Lee.

But San Francisco may no longer be up to the task of hosting a star-studded roster, Benioff warned.

According to Benioff, the event – this year complete with a performance by the Foo Fighters – was plagued by attendees complaining about homelessness and the city's dirty streets.

“If this Dreamforce is affected by the current situation with homelessness and drug use, it could be the last Dreamforce in the city,” Benioff told the San Francisco Chronicle in an interview published this week.

San Francisco has been making headlines for all the wrong reasons in recent months: Homelessness is rampant, shoplifting is on the rise, and gun violence and homicides remain high compared to before the pandemic.

For their part, Benioff and Salesforce are trying to help.

The warning that Dreamforce could leave San Francisco came after it was revealed that Salesforce had donated $1 million to the Salvation Army, an organization focused on helping the homeless.

Benioff added that he was working hard to ensure guests had an enjoyable time at Dreamforce, noting that organizers of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit, scheduled to take place in San Francisco in September, were also doing exactly that will observe.

“As always, we are working hand in hand with the city,” Benioff said. “We will bring a significant number of people to the city – 40,000 people – bringing $57 million to the downtown economy. So it is in all of our interests that things go well and that APEC goes well. This should be the focus of the city.”

San Francisco State

The West Coast city's newfound notoriety could be one of the themes of the conference, where San Francisco Mayor London Breed will speak during Dreamforce.

She will certainly have a lot to discuss. Just last week, the Democrat criticized the city's “homeless coalition” after a court denied the city's right to clear homeless encampments.

According to a 2022 count, just over 7,750 people live on the streets of San Francisco. Of these, around 3,360 sleep outdoors, while around 4,400 sleep in emergency shelters.

In addition, around 6,000 women were homeless and subjected to “overwhelming” levels of violence last year.

According to reports in the San Francisco Chronicle, many women are forced to sell sex to survive, while others are attacked on the streets or in shelters.

Homelessness is exacerbated by drug problems, which in turn drive out employers and businesses.

In April of this year, Whole Foods announced it was closing its flagship store in downtown San Francisco, citing employee safety.

The decision came after the San Francisco Standard reported that hours had been changed because of shoplifting and that restroom rules had been put in place because staff had found syringes and pipes in the facilities.

The city was also the scene of a high-profile knife attack that caught the attention of some of the biggest names in tech.

Bob Lee, the creator of Cash App, was killed in April and died in hospital after suffering multiple stab wounds.

Although a technology consultant has since been charged in the attack, the incident sparked a broader discussion about crime in San Francisco.

Elon Musk, a frequent critic of the city that calls his platform X – formerly Twitter – home, wrote on the social media site at the time: “Violent crime in SF is terrible, and even when attackers are caught, they are often immediately released .” ”

I'm very sorry to hear that. Many people I know have been severely attacked.

Violent crime in SF is terrible and even when attackers are caught, they are often immediately released.

Is the city taking stricter measures to lock up repeat violent offenders @BrookeJenkinsSF?

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 5, 2023

Musk, who is also CEO of Tesla, has similarly claimed that many Twitter employees “feel unsafe coming to work,” calling downtown San Francisco a “disaster,” describing it as “an abandoned zombie -Apocalypse”.

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Droves of business titans have made an annual pilgrimage to Salesforce’s headline conference in San Francisco for decades—but all that could be set to change.

Marc Benioff, CEO of the customer management platform provider, has warned that this year’s Dreamforce conference could be the last held in the Golden City.

Dreamforce has been a major pull to the area since it launched two decades ago—with some 40,000 people expected to descend on the Moscone Center for the two-day event beginning Sept. 12.

The event lineup is world-class: Speakers include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Stanford computer science professor, Fei-Fei Li, as well as celebrities such as Matthew McConaughey, The Office’s Rainn Wilson, and Oscar-winning director Spike Lee.

But San Francisco may no longer be up to the task of hosting a star-studded lineup, Benioff has warned.

The event—this year complete with a performance from Foo Fighters—has previously been plagued by complaints from attendees about the homelessness and dirty city streets, Benioff has claimed.

“If this Dreamforce is impacted by the current situation with homelessness and drug use it may be the last Dreamforce” in the city, Benioff told the San Francisco Chronicle in an interview published this week.

San Francisco has made headlines for all the wrong reasons in recent months: Homelessness is rampant, shoplifting is on the rise, and gun violence and homicides remain elevated compared with before the pandemic.

For his part, Benioff and Salesforce are trying to help.

The warning Dreamforce may depart San Francisco came after the news Salesforce had donated $1 million to the Salvation Army, an organization focused on helping homeless people.

Benioff added he was working hard to ensure guests had an enjoyable time at Dreamforce, noting that organizers of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit due to be held in San Francisco in September will also be closely watching.

“We’re working hand in hand with the city as we always do,” Benioff explained. “We’ll bring a significant number of people to the city—40,000 people—and it will generate $57 million in the downtown economy. So it’s in all of our interests for it to go well, and for APEC to go well. This should be the focus of the city.”

The state of San Francisco

The West Coast city’s newfound notoriety may form one of the themes of the conference, with Mayor of San Francisco London Breed set to speak during Dreamforce.

She’ll certainly have plenty to discuss. Only last week the Democrat blasted the city’s “homeless coalition” after a court blocked the city’s right to clear homeless encampments.

According to a 2022 count, there are just over 7,750 people living on the streets of San Francisco. Of those, approximately 3,360 are sleeping rough, while approximately 4,400 sleep in shelters.

On top of that, over the past year, some 6,000 women have been homeless at any given time, and are facing “overwhelming” levels of violence.

Many women are being forced to sell sex in order to survive, while others are assaulted living on the streets or in shelters according to reports from the San Francisco Chronicle.

Homelessness is compounded by drug problems, which in turn are pushing out employers and businesses.

In April this year, Whole Foods announced it was closing its flagship store in downtown San Francisco, citing employee safety.

The decision came after the San Francisco Standard reported opening hours had been changed because of shoplifting, while rules were introduced to bathroom use because staff found syringes and pipes in the facilities.

The city was also the scene of a high-profile stabbing that caught the attention of some of the biggest names in tech.

Cash App creator Bob Lee was killed in April, dying in hospital after suffering multiple knife wounds.

Although a tech consultant has since been charged with the attack, the incident prompted a wider conversation about crime in San Francisco.

Elon Musk, a frequent critic of the city his platform X—formerly Twitter—calls home, wrote on the social media site at the time: “Violent crime in SF is horrific, and even if attackers are caught, they are often released immediately.”

See more

Very sorry to hear that. Many people I know have been severely assaulted.

Violent crime in SF is horrific and even if attackers are caught, they are often released immediately.

Is the city taking stronger action to incarcerate repeat violent offenders @BrookeJenkinsSF?

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 5, 2023

Musk, who is also CEO of Tesla, has similarly claimed many Twitter employees “feel unsafe coming to work” and labeled downtown San Francisco a “disaster,” likening it to “a derelict zombie apocalypse.”

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They say it’s harder to get into than Harvard: Y Combinator, YC for short, is “startup school” for tech founders. It takes applications twice a year. Being among the 230 startups accepted out of 24,000 means getting a half-million-dollar investment and access to mentors who’ve already made it.

Airbnb, Reddit and DoorDash are on the alumni list. For most of its 18-year history, Y Combinator has been based in Mountain View, California, the heart of Silicon Valley. Recently, though, its center of gravity has moved about 40 miles north to San Francisco.

YC opened a new office in June and now considers the city its headquarters. Garry Tan took over last year in a role once held by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Tan wants founders to be nearby, at least during the first three months they’re in the program. He told Marketplace’s Lily Jamali why during a walk through the city. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Garry Tan: If you leave the center of all of the action, a lot of those companies end up dying. And you need to be around lots and lots of people in order to be successful. And that’s extra true right now, because AI is such a brand-new field, like literally, the large language models and the biggest and the best companies that are creating the platforms right now, like OpenAI, Anthropic, they’re right here. And so San Francisco is mecca.

Lily Jamali: So you call this “Cerebral Valley,” is that right?

Tan: Yeah, a lot of startup founders just coined it; actually, I think a YC company coined it. They threw a conference called Cerebral Valley and it stuck. I think they’re doing their second annual this year.

Jamali: Got it. What does that mean, that term?

Tan: Well, I think it’s a play on really the brain, at the end of the day, and what’s happening now with AI: literally computer silicon, we sort of infused it with electricity and now these things can reason, they can talk. We have talking rocks. And that’s sort of the play, that literally we have electronic brains that can reason in a way that really has never happened before. Like, you can speak to it. It can search large datasets as if it were a human being. That’s wild.

Jamali: Well, what is it about AI and the development of that technology that makes it matter for you to be around people?

Tan: Well, I think just as Seattle had Boeing, and it basically attracted all of the smart people who cared about airplanes, or even Silicon Valley, they call it a Silicon Valley back when semiconductors were relatively new technology. And literally, they invented the idea of Moore’s law there. So I think the same thing is happening here. There are brand-new techniques on how to get the most out of this new technology that literally was not really something that people had access to until the middle of last year even. I think ChatGPT really broke it open. And now what’s happening is that people can create, frankly, thousands of startups, of which maybe a few dozen of them will go on to be worth billions of dollars, because they will create sort of the next Microsoft, the next Google, the next Meta, like the next great startup. There isn’t just going to be one, there might be dozens of them here. I think this is the great frontier. And it’s crazy enough, I think, something that will touch billions of people on the planet, like, the software people build in the city will radiate out to every part of the world, as well.

Jamali: What does it feel like to live in San Francisco right now and work here?

Tan: Personally, I think I’m really torn. I mean, I think that we create, and tech people, and the opportunity that we see, we’re creating incredible amounts of wealth. And then, at the same time, we need to find ways to make our city as vibrant as possible. And that means government. Like, I’m the last person to say, “Hey, like, we want less taxes.” I’m the first person to say, “Actually, let’s take that money, take that wealth, spread it around, but then have effective governance, effective government that actually makes this a truly awesome place to live, not just for tech people, not just for the wealthy, but for everyone.

Jamali: Well, this is like the perennial issue in San Francisco. So first time I lived here was right after the dot-com bubble burst. Then I was here in 2015, when there were the shuttle bus protests, people were very upset. I mean, there’s always this concern about gentrification being driven by the tech industry here.

Tan: Yeah. And I think tech sort of stood back and sort of took it and said, “You know what? Like, we have no response.” And I think we have a response now, which is tech people need to get politically active and demand that we get great government, that we want services that work, that policies have to work. And so that’s the matched pair. And I think it’s happening as we refill the office towers, as we bring vibrancy back to the city, we also want the government to help everyone.

Jamali: So what do you think when you read all these stories in the national press about San Francisco being a mess and being very dangerous? There’s a very clear narrative coming out of certain national outlets about this city right now.

Tan: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s all correct. And it’s the result of government that doesn’t work for the people. And I think it’s not just tech, like it’s the Asian American community, like my elders are being stabbed in the streets. Our children can’t get good educations. And we’ve just allowed it. And I think that ultimately, it’s about people being educated on what’s happening and how we got here, but I think we can turn it back. And it’s more important than ever that San Francisco do that because we want this to be a place that’s welcoming to immigrants, to the smartest people in the world, to all come in one place and create these things that are of incredible value.

Jamali: So you say that those headlines, there’s truth to them, that that negative narrative. That’s how it feels to you living here?

Tan: But we are not doomed to just sit here and take it. I mean, the laws are not being actually enforced here. And when you trace it back, there are real policy issues in San Francisco where, for instance, the police are run by a commission that drown police officers in paperwork. And so that’s one of sort of hundreds of different things that I’ve discovered as I’ve sort of gotten involved in politics. And the thing is, we want this place to be a great place to live. And basic things like traffic enforcement matter a lot.

Jamali: It’s kind of interesting — so that narrative is there, but are you saying at the same time that there is this comeback happening, that maybe a lot of people outside of San Francisco haven’t appreciated? A comeback that’s being driven by the tech industry?

Tan: Yeah, at the end of the day, what we want is prosperity. And the coolest thing in the world is that at Y Combinator, we get to see two or three people come together from any background, from any country in the world, and they have a fair shot here. They get half a million dollars, and they can go and try to create something that touches a billion people. And that’s really what we try to do every day. And if they succeed, they’ll have thousands of employees, and these are good, high-paying jobs in tech. And that will actually create so much prosperity for the whole community, that that’s actually why San Francisco is so awesome.

Jamali: Well, let me ask you this: If your goal seems to be to try to drive tech back to this area, doesn’t that kind of end up with a lot of the same issues that drove a wedge between locals and the tech community 10 years ago, before that, 25 years ago? How do we make sure we don’t repeat the same mistakes?

Tan: I think ultimately, honestly, when you talk about that, we’re talking about housing. And this is the most expensive housing market possibly in the world. And you know what, our policies are absolutely derelict. We’ve abdicated our responsibility to the people as a government in both California and in San Francisco.

More on this

Garry’s concerns about housing are widely shared and grumbled about throughout the Bay Area. In July, David Brancaccio spoke with San Francisco Mayor London Breed for “Marketplace Morning Report.” David noted, at the time, that the median listing price for a home there was $1.3 million. Average rent: $3,600 a month.

On building new housing, Breed told him with process, policy and procedure, “we need to get out of our own way.” Last month, she signed legislation she said will streamline housing construction there. It comes as California mandates the city to build more than 80,000 homes, half of them affordable, over the next eight years.

And here’s an article on Cerebral Valley, which the online outlet The San Francisco Standard calls the city’s “Nerdiest New Neighborhood.” Hacker houses are apparently all the rage again. The Standard likens one of them to a “glorified babysitting service for techies.”

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The company that created ChatGPT was thrown into turmoil Monday after Microsoft hired its ousted CEO and many employees threatened to follow him in a conflict that centered in part on how to build artificial intelligence that’s smarter than humans.

The developments followed a weekend of drama that shocked the AI field and fueled speculation about the future of OpenAI, which named a new chief executive on Friday and then replaced her on Sunday. The newest CEO vowed to investigate the firing of co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, who’s been instrumental in OpenAI’s transformation from a nonprofit research laboratory into a world-renowned commercial startup that inaugurated the era of generative artificial intelligence.

Microsoft, which has been a close partner of the company and invested billions of dollars in it, announced that Altman and OpenAI’s former president, Greg Brockman, would lead its new advanced AI research team. Brockman, also an OpenAI co-founder, quit in protest after Altman was fired.

Hundreds of OpenAI employees, including other top executives, threatened to join them at Microsoft in an open letter addressed to OpenAI’s four-member board that called for the board’s resignation and Altman’s return.

“If the architects and vision and brains behind these products have now left, the company will be a shell of what it once was,” said Sarah Kreps, director of Cornell University’s Tech Policy Institute. “All of that brain trust going to Microsoft will then mean that these impressive tools will be coming out of Microsoft. It will be hard to see OpenAI continue to thrive as a company.”

File – Sam Altman participates in a discussion during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) CEO Summit, Thursday, Nov. 16, 2023, in San Francisco. The board of ChatGPT-maker Open AI says it has pushed out Altman, its co-founder and CEO, and replaced him with an interim CEO. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg, File)

Photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS/Eric Risberg

FILE – Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks on Nov. 15, 2023, in San Francisco. Despite a rift between the key players behind ChatGPT and the company they helped build, both former Twitch leader Emmet Shear and Nadella said they are committed to a partnership. Microsoft snapped up Sam Altman and another architect of ChatGPT maker OpenAI for a new venture after their sudden departures shocked the artificial intelligence world. It’s also left OpenAI’s new CEO to paper over tensions by vowing to investigate Altman’s firing. The developments come Monday, Nov. 20, 2023 after a weekend of drama and speculation about how the power dynamics would shake out at OpenAI. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg, file)

Photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS/Eric Risberg

PreviousNext

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, that he was “extremely excited” to bring on the pair and looked “forward to getting to know” the new management team at OpenAI.

Altman later said on X that his top priority with Nadella is to ensure that OpenAI “continues to thrive” and that it is committed to “fully providing continuity of operations to our partners and customers.”

OpenAI said Friday that Altman was pushed out after a review found he was “not consistently candid in his communications” with the board of directors, which had lost confidence in his ability to lead the company.

In an X post Monday, OpenAI’s new interim chief executive, Emmett Shear, said he would hire an independent investigator to look into Altman’s ouster and write a report within 30 days.

“It’s clear that the process and communications around Sam’s removal” were handled “very badly,” wrote Shear, who co-founded Twitch, an Amazon-owned livestreaming service popular with video gamers.

He said he also plans in the next month to “reform the management and leadership team in light of recent departures.” After that, Shear said, he would “drive changes in the organization,” including “significant governance changes if necessary.”

Originally started as a nonprofit, and still governed as one, OpenAI’s stated mission is to safely build AI that is “generally smarter than humans.” Debates have swirled around that goal and whether it conflicts with the company’s increasing commercial success.

The reason behind the board’s removal of Altman was not a “specific disagreement on safety,” nor does the board oppose commercialization of AI models, Shear said.

OpenAI last week declined to answer questions about Altman’s alleged lack of candor. The company’s statement said his behavior was hindering the board’s ability to exercise its responsibilities.

A key driver of the shakeup, OpenAI’s co-founder, chief scientist and board member Ilya Sutskever, expressed regrets for his participation in the ouster.

“I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we’ve built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company,” he said Monday on X.

The open letter began circulating Monday. According to a copy obtained by The Associated Press, the number of signatures amounted to a majority of the company’s 770 employees. The AP was not able to independently confirm that all of the signatures were from OpenAI employees.

“Everyone at @OpenAI is united,” one of the signatories, research scientist Noam Brown, said on X. “This is not a civil war. Unless Sam and Greg are brought back, there will be no OpenAI left to govern.”

The letter alleged that after Altman’s firing, the company’s remaining executive team had recommended that the board resign and be replaced with a “qualified board” that could stabilize the company. But the board resisted and said allowing OpenAI to be destroyed would be consistent with its mission, according to the letter.

OpenAI has said since its 2015 founding that its goal is to advance AI in a way that benefits all humanity.

A company spokesperson confirmed that the board received the letter.

Microsoft declined to comment on the letter.

After Altman was pushed out, he stirred speculation about coming back into the fold in a series of tweets. He posted a selfie with an OpenAI guest pass Sunday, saying this is “first and last time i ever wear one of these.”

Hours earlier, he tweeted, “i love the openai team so much,” which drew heart replies from Brockman and Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer who was initially named as interim CEO.

It’s not clear what transpired between the announcement of Murati’s interim role Friday and Shear’s hiring, though she was among several employees Monday who tweeted, “OpenAI is nothing without its people.” Altman replied to many with heart emojis.

The board consists of Sutskever, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, tech entrepreneur Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner of the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology. None of them responded to calls or emails seeking comment. Because of its nonprofit structure, the board differs from most startup boards that are typically led by investors.

Altman helped catapult ChatGPT to global fame based on its ability to respond to questions and produce human-like passages of text in a seemingly natural way.

In the past year, he has become Silicon Valley’s most in-demand voice on the promise and potential dangers of artificial intelligence.

Earlier this year, he went on a world tour to meet with government officials, drawing big crowds at public events as he discussed the risks of AI and attempts to regulate the emerging technology.

But as money poured into OpenAI this year, helping to advance its development of more capable AI, it also brought more conflict around whether that fast pace of commercialization fit with the startup’s founding vision, said Kreps, the Cornell University professor. But rather than slow that pace, Altman’s ouster may simply shift it out of OpenAI.

Altman “really has a walk-on-water aura, and I think a lot of it is well deserved,” Kreps said. “He’s the one who has attracted the investment, and he’ll do that wherever it is.”

Microsoft’s shares rose 2% on Monday and hit an all-time high.

The AP and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement allowing OpenAI access to part of the AP’s text archives.

___

Associated Press writers Brian P. D. Hannon in Bangkok and Haleluya Hadero in New York contributed to this report.

Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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Earlier this year at an event in San Francisco, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman dismissed the idea that fully remote work could replace the value of in-office collaboration. This week, his surging company signed the largest office lease seen in the city since 2018.

In a period of doom and gloom for the commercial real estate sector, hammered by remote work and high vacancy rates in cities across the U.S., the deal offers a dose of hope. And for San Francisco, whose struggles with crime and homelessness have been well documented, it adds to a growing presence of companies involved in the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence.

Since kickstarting the AI boom with the release of ChatGPT last year, OpenAI has quickly become one the world’s most valuable closely held companies. Bloomberg reported earlier this month that OpenAI is in talks to sell shares an $86 billion valuation, and it reported in August that the company is on track to generate $1 billion in annual revenue.

OpenAI is leasing two buildings from Uber, which is “right-sizing” its real estate usage, at the ride-hailing company’s headquarters campus in the Mission Bay neighborhood. An Uber spokesperson confirmed to Fortune that the deal had finally closed. (Since it’s a sublease, landlords had to give their consent, which meant longer negotiations.) OpenAI is taking 486,600 square feet in all in the four-building campus.

As the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month, office attendance in large cities is still only about half the level seen in 2019. That’s despite a slight uptick recently and tough talk from high-profile CEOs about enforcing return-to-office policies.

As for San Francisco, it notched a record-high 33.9% office vacancy rate—nearly 30 million square feet listed for lease or sublease—in the third quarter, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle. The paper noted that about 150,000 workers could fill all the empty office space.

The lack of all those employees hurts local businesses, including retailers and restaurants. That combined with the crime problem has prompted companies to give up on the city. In August, one of the city’s flagship retailers, Nordstrom, closed its once-vibrant store.

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As the owner of the mall that Nordstrom inhabited noted, “A growing number of retailers and businesses are leaving the area due to the unsafe conditions for customers, retailers, and employees, coupled with the fact that these significant issues are preventing an economic recovery of the area.”

The city’s “doom spiral” fears continue, but the move by OpenAI provides a bit of hope. And it helps that this year other AI firms have also leased office space in San Francisco.

As the Chronicle reported, Hive AI leased 57,117 square feet in a downtown skyscraper next to Salesforce Tower. Hayden AI leased 41,196 square feet, Anthropic leased 17,735, and Tome AI 16,887. (On Friday, Google said that it’s agreed to invest up to $2 billion in Anthropic, following Amazon saying it will invest up to $4 billion.)

That means five AI companies, including OpenAI, are leasing nearly 620,000 square feet of office space in the city. Of course, that’s still a drop in the bucket compared to amount of vacant space.

“There’s definitely a lot of hope and optimism that [AI] could be the catalyst for the next growth cycle not only for the office market, but for the San Francisco economy,” Colin Yasukochi, executive director of CBRE’s Tech Insights Center, told the Chronicle. But it could be years before “we see this growth cycle really explode,” if it does at all, he noted.

As it turns out, OpenAI’s office deal closed just as another San Francisco tech company ended a return-to-office experiment. Expensify, with a market cap of about $215 million, said this week that it’s closing an upscale office lounge where employees could enjoy champagne or a draft beer while collaborating in a restaurant-style booth or working on laptops at the bar.

In a blog post this week, Expensify CEO David Barrett described the lounge as an experiment on luring employees back into the office, and he concluded that remote work had won. “We’re just never going back to a regular nine-to-five office culture, a staple of not just our modern culture, but also the foundation of most urban planning,” he wrote.

For his part, OpenAI’s Altman—who has become a household name in the tech world and perhaps beyond—stressed the need for in-person collaboration and noted the shortcomings of remote work during a Stripe conference in San Francisco earlier this year.

“I think definitely one of the tech industry’s worst mistakes in a long time was that everybody could go full remote forever, and startups didn’t need to be together in person and, you know, there was going to be no loss of creativity,” he told attendees. “I would say that the experiment on that is over, and the technology is not yet good enough that people can be full remote forever, particularly on startups.”

OpenAI did not immediately reply to Fortune’s request for comments.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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Provided homes for parolees, probationers; used multiple aliases

Sought $34,655,437 in fraudulent PPP loans during COVID

Jury found former religious leader guilty on 44 felony counts

By U.S. Attorney’s Office, Northern District of California

OAKLAND – Attila Colar, aka Dahood Sharieff Bey, aka Sharieff Dahood Bey, aka Sharieff Pasha, aka David Lee, aka Georgi Petrakov, was sentenced to serve 204 months (17 years) in prison after being convicted of forty-four (44) felonies including conspiracy, bank fraud, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, false statements to a bank, destruction of property to prevent a search, possession of a firearm as a felon, making a false tax return, obstruction, and witness tampering. The sentence was handed down by the Honorable Haywood S. Gilliam, Jr., U.S. District Judge.

Colar, 51, of Richmond, Calif., was convicted of the crimes by a jury on June 23, 2023, after a three-week trial. Colar is the former Chief Executive Officer of All Hands on Deck, a Richmond, Calif., company that held itself out as providing a residential reentry home for probationers, parolees, homeless persons, and persons with mild mental illness. In finding him guilty of the sundry crimes, the jury concluded Colar carried out multiple schemes to defraud, including defrauding organizations that placed residents at his company’s transitional housing facilities and defrauding several lenders that were participating in the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). The jury also found that Colar attempted to destroy evidence, obstructed the FBI’s and grand jury’s investigations into his crimes, and tampered with a witness by attempting to concealing the witness while law enforcement was taking steps to execute a material witness order.

According to opengovus.com the organization was incorporated in Hercules and is listed as a “Minority-Owned”, and “Black American Owned” non-profit in 2015 but the registration has expired. The only officer listed is Jamlia Pasha as Manager.

According to transitionalhousing.org, “All Hands on Deck Ink is a clean and sober living environment that offers a structured living program for recovering individuals, Homeless Veterans, Parolees, and Individuals with Mental Health Conditions. The environment creates good habits and healthy outlooks that will lead their residents to positive results. Offer all of the residents access to a clean and stable environment, life skill courses, 12 step program, educational opportunities, business and economic training, and resource referrals. There is a sliding scale fee. Accept self pay, vouchers and other housing rent assistance programs. Residents will have access to internet, washer and dryer, cable, a healthy meal, programs, resources and more. As accepting new residents now, call their housing managers today for placement.” It has a location at a home in El Sobrante. That information was last updated on July 13, 2023.

“In the wake of a national crisis, the government established programs, including the Paycheck Protection Program, to ease the pain inflicted by a global pandemic,” said Ismail J. Ramsey, United States Attorney for the Northern District of California. “Colar took this opportunity to defraud the government, while also defrauding several other initiatives intended to help the homeless, newly released prisoners, and those with drug problems, to name just a few of his victims. This sentence should serve as a warning that this office will pursue with vigor those who seek to line their own pockets by defrauding government efforts to address our communities’ needs.”

“Colar is now facing the consequences for his attempt to steal from a taxpayer-funded program designed to offer crucial relief to those businesses affected during the pandemic,” said Robert K. Tripp, Special Agent in Charge, San Francisco Field Office, Federal Bureau of Investigation. “We are proud to have worked in close coordination with our federal partners to ensure justice prevailed in this case.”

“This sentencing sends a clear warning that you will be brought to justice if you defraud the federal government of pandemic relief funds,” said Jon Ellwanger, Special Agent in Charge, Western Region, Office of Inspector General for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “We are proud to have worked with our federal law enforcement partners and the U.S. Attorney’s Office to hold Mr. Colar accountable for his crimes.”

“Abusing SBA’s pandemic relief programs that are intended to provide critical relief to small businesses is unconscionable.” said SBA OIG’s Western Region Special Agent in Charge Weston King. “This sentencing further showcases that those who fraudulently take advantage of federal government programs will face justice for their selfish deeds. I want to thank the U.S. Attorney’s Office and our law enforcement partners for their dedication and commitment to seeing justice served.”

“Mr. Colar attempted to defraud the U.S. government by filing multiple false tax documents to further his Paycheck Protection Program scheme. Along the way, he harmed the members of the community those funds are designed to aid and protect,” said IRS-Criminal Investigation Special Agent in Charge Darren Lian of the Oakland Field Office. “This sentencing reinforces that people who abuse the U.S. tax system and victimize taxpayers will be held accountable. IRS Criminal Investigation agents work closely with multiple agencies to help ensure those who choose to break the law are caught and punished. I would like to thank the United States’ Attorney’s Office’s and its federal partners for working together to achieve a just result.”

“When individuals corruptly obstruct the due administration of the Internal Revenue Code and file documents under false pretenses, they defraud and steal funds from taxpayer-funded programs intended to assist small businesses. TIGTA will always pursue these individuals and ensure they are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” stated Special Agent in Charge Rod Ammari. “I want to thank our law enforcement partners and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for their joint efforts to hold these criminals accountable for their actions.”

Evidence at trial showed that starting in late 2018, Colar engaged in a scheme to defraud, among others, GEO Reentry, which provided treatment and supervision programs for adult probationers, parolees, and pretrial defendants in residential, in-custody, and non-residential reentry centers for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). Specifically, in or about 2019, Colar fraudulently induced GEO Reentry to refer parolees to All Hands on Deck using falsified fire inspection clearance reports, a false letter of recommendation, false security clearance documents, and false and misleading information about its staff.

Additional evidence demonstrated that in April and June of 2020, Colar engaged in a second scheme to defraud lenders participating in the PPP lending plan authorized by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. The CARES Act was designed to provide emergency financial assistance to the millions of Americans who were suffering from the economic effects caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Pursuant to the CARES Act, the SBA managed the PPP lending plan. Trial evidence established Colar submitted multiple loan applications on behalf of All Hands on Deck to lenders that were false and misleading. For example, the applications substantially overstated the number and payroll of All Hands on Deck employees—while Colar’s loan applications stated All Hands on Deck had approximately 73 to 81 employees, the business had, in fact, perhaps other than himself, no salaried employees.

Colar was also convicted of offenses related to the submission of multiple fraudulent loan applications in the name of other companies. The evidence demonstrated Colar hastily revived two dormant companies, and then submitted loan applications from the PPP lending plan for the bogus businesses. To carry out this scheme to defraud, Colar used, without legal authority, the names and identities of two persons living in his residential reentry facility. Colar falsely represented that the residents were “CEO”s of companies with hundreds of employees with million-dollar payrolls.

In all, the evidence at trial showed that Colar submitted a total of 16 fraudulent loan applications to the PPP lending plan seeking approximately $34,655,437 in PPP loans.

Colar also was convicted of obstruction and witness tampering relating to the investigations into his crimes. Colar has been found guilty of destroying documents during a search of his home, lying to the FBI about a firearm, falsifying records produced to the grand jury, interfering with the representation by counsel of a material witness by impersonating the witness’s Power of Attorney, coaching a witness to falsely state that the witness was the CEO of one of Colar’s bogus companies that submitted fraudulent loan applications, and concealing a witness in multiple hotels and other locations in the Bay Area to forestall or prevent the witness from providing testimony in the federal grand jury.

In sum, Colar was convicted of forty-four (44) federal criminal offenses for his conduct. The convictions include the following: one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1349; one count to commit conspiracy to commit bank fraud and wire fraud, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1349; two counts of bank fraud, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1344; sixteen counts of wire fraud, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1343; eight counts of aggravated identity theft, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1028A; two counts of false statement to a bank, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1014; one count of possession of a firearm by a felon, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g); one count of destruction of property to prevent a search or seizure, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2232(a); one count of obstruction of justice, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2); two counts of falsification of records in a federal investigation, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1519; six counts of making a false tax return, in violation of 26 U.S.C. § 7206; one count of conspiracy to tamper with a witness, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1512(k); one count of tampering with a witness, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1512(b)(1); and one count of tampering with a witness, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1512(b)(2).

In addition to the prison term, Judge Gilliam also ordered Colar to serve 60 months (five years) of supervised release, to begin after his prison term. Restitution will be determined at a later date. Colar is currently in federal custody and will begin serving his prison term immediately.

According to an Oct. 3, 2020 ABC7 News report, “Colar was the leader of a Black Muslim temple in Oakland and a group that was a spinoff of Your Black Muslim Bakery, after the leader of the bakery was arrested and later convicted of ordering the murder of Oakland journalist Chauncey Bailey.” He “was convicted in 2015 and sentenced to five years in state prison for submitting bogus documents to win security contracts with Alameda County, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles.”

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Barbara J. Valliere, Adam A. Reeves, and Ross D. Mazer are prosecuting the case with the assistance of Paralegal Specialist Laurie Worthen and Legal Assistant Kathy Tat. The prosecution is the result of an investigation by the FBI, IRS-Criminal Investigation, Office of Inspector General for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Internal Revenue Service: Criminal Investigation, Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, and Office of Inspector General for the U.S. Small Business Administration.

Allen D. Payton contributed to this report.

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In his first major public interview since the DMV cut their San Francisco fleet in half, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt said “we cannot expect perfection” from the self-driving cars, and vaguely threatened to leave town if regulators curtail them any further. From a report: The self-driving robotaxis of GM subsidiary Cruise and Google-owned Waymo seemed like they were heading in a successful direction when they won approval from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) last month to run their self-driving robotaxis at all hours in SF without restrictions. But barely a week later, the California DMV demanded Cruise cut it SF fleet in half, following post-Outside Lands stalling incidents, a night of multiple accidents, and SF City Attorney David Chiu filing a motion to get the CPUC to reverse their decision.

Cruse CEO Kyle Vogt sat down for a (very friendly) 40-minute interview Wednesday at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, which can be seen in its entirety above. And he seems to be going on offense against the regulatory pushback his company is getting from SF and California lawmakers. “It’s kind of fun as a society to poke at the differences between AVs (autonomous vehicles) and humans, but if we’re serious about safety in our cities, we should be rolling out the red carpet for AVs,” Vogt said, according to the SF Standard.

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After a year-long search, struggling retailer Gap Inc. has found a new chief executive officer in Richard Dickson, the president and chief operating officer of toy company Mattel Inc. The owner of such brands as Gap, Old Navy and Athleta praised Dickson’s track record as a “proven transformational brand builder” who it hopes “redefines the future potential” of Gap, whose stock surged as much as 9%. Here’s hoping for Gap’s sake.

What the San Francisco-based retailer failed to mention in its announcement is that Dickson becomes the seventh CEO over the last 20 years to take on the challenge of turning around Gap’s ailing fortunes. In that time, Gap’s shares have fallen 48%, compared with a gain of 356% for the benchmark S&P 500 Index. Such performance over a sustained period of time suggests Gap’s troubles are deeply structural, and it’s fair to ask whether any one person can right this ship.

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