London could be on track to “overtake San Francisco in the AI era”, according to Onfido and Quench founder Husayn Kassai, as advancements in the technology reduce financial barriers.
In a post on LinkedIn, Kassai, who has been working in AI for over a decade, claimed that “London has been overlooked” and contains all the elements required to become the number one destination for the AI industry.
He claimed that San Francisco has been relying on its undeniable financial advantages, but while it may have taken $300m of investor cash to produce a unicorn in the past, Kassai believes with AI, capital efficiency will increase massively, levelling the playing field.
This would still leave San Francisco containing a huge amount of the world’s best AI experts, but Kassai argued that while Silicon Valley has more talent in “absolute numbers”, the question of “accessible AI talent” is entirely different.
“Top engineers at Google or OpenAI won’t join early-stage startups unless you’re paying astronomical salaries or giving founder-level equity,” wrote Kassai.
“London surrounds us with world-class universities, such as Imperial, Cambridge, Oxford, and King’s. The graduates here are brilliant, hungry, and actually accessible.”
Kassai has run his businesses with locations in both London and San Francisco and noted that retention of UK engineers is far better than in California.
“You can’t build anything meaningful with constant turnover,” he said. This combined with concerning immigration messaging from President Trump potentially encouraging top minds from European research to move to London instead of San Francisco to pursue the technology positions the British capital well.
“For building sustainable AI companies, London has been overlooked – but not for long. It’s now in the race for the top spot,” he concluded.
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