AI for good? Two techies host hackathons for SF's problems

While artificial intelligence evangelists promise to save the world, two local AI enthusiasts have narrowed their focus: Save San Francisco.

That is the clarion call two twenty-something techies are making at social gatherings around the city, inviting fellow coders to a hackathon on September 23 and 24. Instead of promising to solve homelessness, housing and the city’s approach to data in one fell-swoop, they are looking for down-to-earth applications of AI — bites off the bigger problems.

Already 200 engineers have signed up for their sessions.

“Many people complain about problems in San Francisco,” said Anthony Jancso, a former employee of Palantir, a data analytics company known for its intelligence, military, and immigration enforcement contracts. “We really wanted to give them an opportunity to actually submit project ideas to improve on San Francisco.”

Jansco and Jordan Wick, a former employee of autonomous vehicle company Waymo, founded Accelerate SF earlier this summer with the goal of building AI solutions for the city’s most pressing challenges.

This “hackathon” is a chance for attendees to work simultaneously. Each will decide their own project and do their best to do something — anything — to help the city in two days. This can include streamlining application processes, organizing data sets, and making financial data easier to access.

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Especially successful projects may have the potential for “city-wide deployment,” the event says — though it is not clear what official backing those projects would have.

Wick said they see the hackathon as “redirecting some of this builder energy and engineer brainpower to just thinking and hopefully acting on some of these challenges.”

The two entrepreneurs said the vast majority of new AI start-ups have focused on private sector use cases and shied away from government problems because of the perception that “it’s really hard to interact with the government or to deploy solutions within the government,” said Jancso.

Accelerate SF wants to help with that. “Everyone we reached out to was very happy to get back and open the doors for us,” said Jancso.

As part of the hackathon, the two have a speaker series, and already on the list are California state Sen. Scott Wiener, who is expected to focus on housing issues, and District 4 Supervisor Joel Engardio.

They are also in conversation with the Mayor’s Office of Innovation, the San Francisco Police Department, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, and other organizations like YIMBY Action, which has close ties with tech workers, and the Housing Action Coalition.

Through its discussions with the city and other tech workers, the team has identified 11 challenges in San Francisco’s public sector where software solutions could help the city. They shared a few.

One is housing. Using large language models — a type of AI — engineers may be able to find a way to help businesses fill out the permit application forms to expedite the construction process.

Filling out permits might be less exciting than more dramatic ideas espoused elsewhere, but Jancso believes these small changes are where the potential of the technology lies. “This is obviously not going to solve homelessness for sure, but it can definitely have a positive impact on house prices,” said Jancso.

They’ve also suggested a chatbot that could parse through government datasets. Current interfaces, they said, are difficult to use, and they hope to streamline that process — a simple application of what ChatGPT is already doing.

Users, for example, wouldn’t have to download datasets in cumbersome programs such as Excel. Instead, government employees could just simply talk to their data sets and ask simple questions such as, “how much did we spend on fixed income on mitigating homelessness in the Tenderloin or which law talks about this thing?”

They hope that by collaborating with local stakeholders, they can find a path to citywide deployment after the hackathon. “Technology is a way to do more with less resources, and large language models are a new technology to do more with less resources,” said Jancso, who called these applications “low-hanging fruit.”

As for the profit model of Accelerate SF, “what we really want to do is to just be useful,” said Jancso. “We’ll first start with this hackathon and then we’ll see where it takes us.”

The Accelerate SF hackathon is tentatively scheduled for Sept. 23 and 24 and is still accepting new registrants. According to Jancso and Wick, investor Jeremiah Owyang, Peter Hirshberg, chairman of the Maker City Project, and “Steve Jobs’ former marketing director,” are also on the list of participants.

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REPORTER. Yujie Zhou is our newest reporter and came on as an intern after graduating from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. She is a full-time staff reporter as part of the Report for America program that helps put young journalists in newsrooms. Before falling in love with the Mission, Yujie covered New York City, studied politics through the “street clashes” in Hong Kong, and earned a wine-tasting certificate in two days. She’s proud to be a bilingual journalist. Follow her on Twitter @Yujie_ZZ.