At 17 He Skipped the Ivy League for SF Hacker Houses — and Watched Midjourney and Claude Be Born
TheMoonMidas · x · 2026-09-22
A first-person account of an unconventional AI career path: at 17 the author flew to San Francisco, turned down a selective Ivy League program, and hacked on AI models from a WeWork while figuring out an O1 visa. Midjourney co-founder David Holz gave him a place to stay — and he watched Holz quit his job to build what became Midjourney.
At 18 he moved into a hacker house with Andrej Karpathy, Noam and other AI researchers, gathering to hack on every new model release (Whisper, DALL·E, Stable Diffusion). In 2022, lab founder Ben Mann visited and invited them to try a new Slackbot — which became Claude. A vivid firsthand witness of SF's AI hacker-house golden era.
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