Working the 996 schedule every week and having prefabricated meals for every meal, Generation Z in the U.S. AI industry is going crazy with competition: living in "coffin rooms" and working 92 hours a week.

In the late spring of 2005, at Stanford University.

Nineteen-year-old Sam Altman sat in a small classroom, listening to the professor slowly explain algorithms and system architecture.

Altman felt a deep gap between the classroom and the future.

He vaguely understood in his heart that what could truly change the world wouldn't be found in the symbols on the blackboard.

So, he decided to drop out of school and start a business. His first company was Loopt, a location-based social networking mobile application.

Twenty years later, today, he has become the leader of OpenAI, been named the CEO of the Year by Time magazine, and become a totem figure in the wave of artificial intelligence.

In the same year, another young man was causing a storm globally.

A year earlier, in 2004, at Harvard University, Mark Zuckerberg and his classmates started developing a social network (initially named Thefacebook) in their dormitory. This was the prototype of Facebook.

In the summer of 2004/at the end of his sophomore year, 20-year-old Zuckerberg decided to drop out of Harvard and fully devote himself to the construction of Facebook.

Zuckerberg had already included all the schools in the United States in his "social network".

After Facebook was launched, as the number of users increased, he and his partners moved to Palo Alto, California (Palo Alto is part of Silicon Valley).

Now, Zuckerberg sits beside Donald Trump at the White House, "chatting and laughing", and providing an annual investment of $600 billion.

A few days after twenty years, Altman and Zuckerberg have become the totems and synonyms of the AI wealth-creation era.

One owns the world's largest non-listed AI company, and the other is offering contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to recruit the top AI talents.

In San Francisco, Silicon Valley, there is never a shortage of young people and their trillion-dollar market value dreams!

Wealth still has an irresistible magic for young people.

Twenty years later, today, the same history seems to be repeating itself, except that this time the young people are even more fanatical!

When the wave of AI hits, no one can predict how large this wave will be. So:

These 20-year-old young people "sacrifice their weekends": no drinking, no sleeping, no socializing, just to pursue the dream of a trillion-dollar market value;

They work 92 hours a week and sleep on the floor in the office. The sleeping places of these new Silicon Valley founders are jokingly called "coffin rooms";

Countless 20-something dropouts who flock to San Francisco give up everything except their laptops!

No drinking, no sleeping, no entertainment

On Sunday, the sky in San Francisco had a lazy golden glow.

But 28-year-old Marty Kausas was busy in his office.

Otherwise, where else could he be?

Recently, Kausas just recorded on LinkedIn his "record" of working 92 hours a week for three consecutive weeks.

Although he once tried to go on vacation, he flew back halfway because of the great work pressure.

Kausas' goal is very "simple and straightforward": to build a company worth $10 billion in 10 years.

Of course, it's not all about money. After all, there are easier ways to make money. Similarly, it's not for any lofty mission. After all, he's working on customer support software, not saving the world.

In Kausas' view, entrepreneurship is like a chess game - a game he is determined to win.

"Actually, I could have gone to a big tech company to be a programmer. But that would be so boring," he said, as if it were an unbearable mediocre thing.

Kausas' thoughts may not be fundamentally different from those of 19-year-old Altman and Zuckerberg.

So, he turned around and raised $51 million in investment for Pylon, the AI startup he co-founded.

In San Francisco, if you throw a stone randomly, you might hit a tech founder like Marty who is ambitious or has already achieved success.

This new generation of founders grew up watching the movie The Social Network about the origin of Facebook, started using iPhones as soon as they could read, and began to swim in the ocean of code as teenagers.

They flock to this city where "even genius weirdos have a place", dreaming of winning the ultimate prize that everyone desires - building a trillion-dollar company with global users.

To achieve this goal, they rarely drink, scoff at the idea of "work-life balance", and are caught in an endless race to see who is (or seems to be) the most obsessed one.

"You have to work all the time, and you have to work very hard!" said 24-year-old Mackay Grant.

Last year, in order to move to San Francisco to start an AI finance company, he didn't even attend his college graduation ceremony.

"If I can start a company, why would I go to a bar and drink?" 23-year-old Emily Yuan retorted.

She dropped out of Stanford University and co-founded an AI financial infrastructure company called Corgi.

Like many 20-something founders, Yuan spends most of her short time outside the office on social activities closely related to work.

Some founders' only rest is to sweat in the gym or take a sauna in the city bath, and by the way, talk to their peers about the next round of financing.

Some others share excerpts from Ayn Rand's book The Fountainhead, a tribute to strivers, on social media.

Starting a company seems to only require an idea and a laptop, which gives founders the hope of operating a multi-billion-dollar enterprise single-handedly.

Many of them graduated from Y Combinator, a top startup incubator that has nurtured industry-changing giants like DoorDash and Airbnb.

Altman was the president of Y Combinator before becoming the CEO of OpenAI.

Since its establishment in 2005, Y Combinator has invested in more than 5,000 companies, with a total valuation of over $800 billion.

This year, the incubator's summer program received 20,000 applications.

To outsiders, the founders' lives may seem joyless. These young people are chasing wealth in one of the most picturesque cities in the United States but have no time to enjoy the scenery. They can only hunch over in front of the computer, eating pre-packaged meals.

However, for many of them, this is the price of success.

Haseab Ullah used his savings to start an AI customer service chatbot.

He works at Founders Inc., a seaside startup park in Fort Mason that provides desks, hardware labs, game rooms, and a stage for hackathons and fireside chats.

He said that to save time and avoid the trouble of cooking, he only orders one Uber Eats delivery every day.

Ullah spends $700 a month living in a living and working space converted from an office building, where about 20 people live.

The beds are concentrated in the common area, and they are fully enclosed "sleeping pods" with privacy curtains, just like train berths.

When he pulls the curtain, it's pitch-black in his sleeping pod, allowing him to sleep soundly during the day after working all night.

"You feel like you're lying in a coffin every night," he said. "But other than that, everything is great."

AI entrepreneurship "PhD"

Poor, hungry, desperate

Kausas is the descendant of Lithuanian immigrants. His father is a pastor, and his mother runs a non-profit organization.

He originally planned to live directly in the office.

But the founder of Pylon finally made some concessions to traditional life and rented a four-bedroom apartment one block away from the company.

He has pre-packaged meals for breakfast and lunch, provided by a company founded by health guru Bryan Johnson, who is obsessed with longevity.

In this way, he doesn't have to worry about what to eat, and his work efficiency on weekdays will be higher.

Kausas said that in his mind, the most ideal sales staff have the "PhD" characteristics - that is Poor, Hungry, and Desperate.

His leisure activities are also related to work.

On a recent Saturday, he gave a speech at a hackathon.

On another weekend, he invited another founder to go cycling in Golden Gate Park.

The two men, who have invested in each other's companies, talked about why it's difficult for entrepreneurs to find dating partners during the bike ride.

25-year-old Nico Laqua's father is a lawyer at an insurance company.

But he is determined to replace the traditional insurance industry and make Corgi a trillion-dollar company.

When recruiting, he only hires people who are willing to work seven days a week.

When new employees join, he gives them a mattress that can be placed in the office as a welcome gift.

Among more than 40 employees, about 30 are former founders.

"I live in the office," Laqua said. He considers himself the most hardworking among his peers, and his employees also deeply agree.

Laqua said that although the company doesn't require it, "two-thirds of the early employees got Corgi tattoos."

Laqua regrets getting a degree from Columbia University because he couldn't solve social problems in the classroom and at school.

"I always want to do the most amazing thing I can think of and have the greatest possible impact," he said.