One square mile
What Los Angeles was to NFTs, San Francisco is to AI — except this time the thing at the center is real, and the center has never been so small
I have stood in the wrong center before, so I think I've earned the right to recognize the real one.
In 2022 I moved my family to Los Angeles because the crypto world swore that was where the future was being minted. It was a hall of mirrors. The geography was real; the future at the middle of it was not. I came home with an expensive, useful lesson: a hype center and a real center feel identical from far away and nothing alike once you're standing inside.
San Francisco is the real one.
Look at where this is actually being built. The way economies will run, the way we'll talk to machines, the shape of the next decade — nearly every lab that matters sits inside a perimeter you could walk across before your coffee gets cold. Less than a square mile. Never in history has so much of the future been assembled on so small a footprint.
The honest analogy is Los Alamos. They put everyone who mattered behind one fence and compressed a decade into two years. Proximity wasn't a perk. Proximity was the technology.
If you're building an AI company and you mean it, there has never been a chance like this to stand inside the blast radius. You cannot phone a revolution in from four thousand miles away.
We planted the flag early — Ctrl AI, incorporated in Delaware back in April 2024, before I could have told you exactly what it would become. The next step isn't legal. It's geographic.
I've spent a career proving you can build serious things from Prague. I still believe it. But some bets you carry to the center, because the center is the bet. We're taking Ctrl AI to the square mile.