The San Francisco AI Billboards

There was a time in my life when going to the San Francisco Bay felt like a regular part of life, but that was a long time ago. So when I recently found myself back there, I came to rediscover something I had once known: It is perhaps the only place on earth littered with billboards for technology companies.

Of course, it wouldn’t be 2026 unless I told you that these days, all of these advertisers are all in on “AI”. So without further ado, feast your eyes on the horror.

Billboarding reading “KIMI is an Open Model.” in large centered text, with a small lower right caption reading “Spend 70% less.”
“Open” is it? You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Two billboards side by side, one reading “AI fraud broke trust. We're rebuilding it.” and the other “Where 90% of enterprise AI revenue lives”.
I think they're onto something here, 90% of the revenue in “AI” probably is from committing fraud.
Billboard reading: “We secure. You touch grass.”
And who exactly secures this product? Grass? Yeah, that sounds about right.
A billboard showing a person holding a takeout Chinese food container, while bending over their clearly very expensive home office, to do something on the laptop. The only caption is the OpenAI logo and the text “Codex”.
Imagine thinking the pinnacle of life is having the most expensive crap in your office, but not being able to afford the luxury of eating a meal in peace.
The back of a bus with an add for “Firecrawl” captioned “Web Data for AI”.
Wait, are these the assholes that have been hammering our collective web infrastructure for the past few years in search of a cheap buck?

I don't know what I was hoping to achieve by sharing these with you, except perhaps to say: The San Francisco Bay is not a healthy place.