A city’s live is vibrant and sometimes chaotic, coming with growing pains and needs for resources.

San Francisco is a city that comes with its own set of problems, but also with the biggest pool of technology talent and ideas, an unparalleled global resource.

In the past year alone, San Francisco stole the headlines as the Global Capital of AI.

According to San Francisco government official website, San Francisco has the highest number of AI related jobs in the country: 22%, which is more than the second (Cupertino, Silicon Valley) and third (Los Angeles) ranked cities combined. The city has raised almost double the next largest market outside of the Bay Area since 2018.

OpenAI signed a lease for 486,600 square feet in Mission Bay -- the largest office lease signing in San Francisco in 5 years. Anthropic recently signed a 250,000-square-foot lease. So why not use the impressive local AI knowledge and platforms to solve the city’s socio-economic pain points and aid the local government?

Accelerate SF could the answer to that: ‘building AI solutions for SF’s public sector challenges’ and ‘inspiring engineers to improve SF’.

The initiative is led by former tech employees Anthony Jancso (Palantir), Jordan Wick (Waymo), and Kay Sorin (YouTube). The first two days- long Accelerate SF hackathon took place on November 4 - 5th at Fort Mason and united over 150 engineers and speakers who pitched and demo-ed solutions for the public sector challenges.

The event was backed by public and private stakeholders alike: San Francisco and state government officials and AI companies’ founders and executives, including big names such as OpenAI, Chroma, Stripe, DeepAI, Anthropic, Zo, Scale, Replit.

Among the speakers and judges were the San Francisco Mayor, London Breed, State Senator, Scott Wiener, SF City Attorney, David Chu, city supervisors, executives and founders from Chroma, Scale AI, Anthropic, Notion, Swyx, Langchain and more.

The hackathon winners came with practical applied AI solutions for San Francisco’s pain points, anywhere from alleviating your inconvenience when you have to report your car or home break-ins, homelessness and crises intervention solutions to streamlining a building’s remodeling, expansions and additions within the allowable zoning and city building code.

‘311 Plus’ won the first place. The solution presented during the hackathon is which is a tool/app where you could take a photo if your car had a break-in. With the use of AI technology, the photo will automatically input a 311 report, using meta data from the photo’s location and time.

There have been an estimated 17,000 car break-ins in San Francisco this year alone and many went unreported, most of the time because of the inconvenience of the reporting process.

CityStructure, a Proptech company came in second. The San Francisco based startup offers development analysis powered by AI for single family and multi-unit buildings. How does it work? The AI powered platform transforms public data about building, permitting, zoning ordinances and laws, regulations and public records into easy to digest information for homeowners, architects, builders and real estate professionals alike.

A simple address check on the CityStructure website will give you an analysis about zoning and building potential, with the option of detailed reports with calculations of the building area, number of units and budget.

We expect that some of the AI solutions presented at the Accelerate SF will become pilot projects and eventually scaled city and Bay Area-wide and set the tone for more PPP initiatives.