OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said that it may be time to “pace the rate of AI development” so that society can “harden around some of these new capability levels.”

On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed how Altman’s comments were probably prompted by a recent hack in which an OpenAI agent breached Hugging Face’s systems. Sean noted that while a hack performed by an AI agent is novel, the hack itself was not  “some new advanced thing.”

“It was more like Nixon’s people breaking into Watergate than some real stealthy cyber-op, because it didn’t need to be, and it wasn’t instructed to be,” Sean said. “Hopefully, this is a sign that these companies will take this forward and be more careful about that stuff.”

Altman’s comments also gave me a chance to wonder about the usefulness of the whole accelerationist versus deceleration debate, because (yes, I’m about to quote myself) the framing “kind of suggests that there’s only one path” and “all we get to decide — inasmuch as we get to decide at all — is, do we speed up or do we slow down?”

Keep reading for a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Sean O’Kane: Maybe we’ve finally hit an inflection point here. I think a big driver of this has to be what we talked about last week, with one of OpenAI’s models breaking into Hugging Face’s data and apparently breaching a few other things around the internet, as well. 

[Altman’s] not calling for a pause, like we’ve seen some people in the tech industry try to do in the past. He was very careful with his words and saying, “Pace it.” And we’ll see how this holds. Any caution that we see some of these labs throw out there often gets reversed when the incentives push them forward to resume, full speed ahead. So I remain skeptical, big surprise.

Kirsten Korosec: Now I will say this — [Altman] might have been careful with his words, but OpenAI and Anthropic did [support] a petition that does reflect what he did talk about.

And I do agree with you, I think that a lot of this was very much triggered by Hugging Face. It probably spooked him and certainly a lot of people in the industry. The hard thing here is: How do you thread the needle or how does OpenAI thread the needle of continuing to generate revenue, raise money, or have a successful IPO, and quote unquote “pace development.”

I don’t know if they can do that. I’ll be curious to see if they manage both.

Anthony Ha: One of the things I’ve been wrestling with is also this question of: Is acceleration [vs.] deceleration the right framework to be thinking about this? Because it kind of suggests that there’s only one path and we’re all stuck on this path. All we get to decide — inasmuch as we get to decide at all — is, do we speed up or do we slow down? As opposed to — again, I’m going to really torture this metaphor — but do we build different guardrails? Do we choose different paths? 

I’m just very resistant to this framework. As opposed to saying, “Okay, if we’re not happy about what models are doing right now, what else can we do? Is a slowdown, a pause, a stoppage, the only option?” And I don’t think it is.

One thing that I did want to emphasize again, because it’s been really interesting to see the level of alarm around this — this sense of, “What if we have these autonomous agents and models just running around hacking each other, trying to prevent hacks, it’s just all getting out of our control,” leading to all these broader debates about alignment that Rebecca Bellan did a great piece about.

But it’s worth coming back to one of the points that we also wrote about at TechCrunch, that this specific hack — yes, it was caused by an OpenAI model, but it sounds like they just didn’t secure the testing site properly. In theory, this model should not have been able to get online. Now, of course, if you have a powerful misaligned AI, the risks of that human error go up dramatically. But it does start from just the fact that they didn’t secure things the way they should have.

Sean: I think that’s right. I think your point is well taken in the sense of, we shouldn’t only think about this in some linear fashion and whether things are accelerating or decelerating. There’s a lot that could and should be said about just how responsible these companies are being. Lorenzo, one of our colleagues, also wrote a really good piece walking through how serious security researchers who pay attention to this stuff think that the hack really was. It really does seem like, on both sides of this hack, there were steps that probably should have been taken that would have prevented it. 

And one of the things that I found most interesting in that story was that some of the researchers were pointing out that what this model did was not some new advanced thing. It was really very human in the way that it thought about trying to break into trying — not to anthropomorphize, but the way that it thought about breaking into Hugging Face, and that it was also very loud and messy and wasn’t really trying to hide its tracks. It was more like Nixon’s people breaking into Watergate than some real stealthy cyber-op, because it didn’t need to be, and it wasn’t instructed to be.

That should have been more easily preventable. And hopefully, this is a sign that these companies will take this forward and be more careful about that stuff. 

I will say one other thing on the accel vs decel [debate.] I don’t know if this is the motivation, but you mentioned the IPO, Kirsten. I think it’s smart of Altman to be able to push this advantage that they have now, which is that [OpenAI is] not going to [the] markets next month, or two months from now. He’s even floated the idea of going in 2027 and that they only filed their confidential filing so that they have the option ready when they’re ready.

So if you believe all of that, he has the ability to talk this talk in a way that Anthropic can’t, because Anthropic’s already in conversation with a lot of the bankers and is headed towards a more near-term IPO and is therefore more restricted in what it can say and how it should be saying it and how the market is going to react to that.

Six twentysomethings in East London have built what they say is the anti-San Francisco hacker house. The goal is a “holistic improvement in life,” rather than “12 weeks, Demo Day is coming,” Rowan Aldean, 26, explained. 

Intrigued, I spent an afternoon visiting the house, meeting its residents, and doing a vibe check. I arrived after Aldean escorted me through the clean sidewalks of a new East London development to where the six-story building stood facing the water. 

The house is called the London Island Founder House — or “Lift House” — and Aldean and his wife, Zahraa, 22, an upcoming pharmaceutical research PhD candidate, have lived there since May, just a few months after it officially launched in March. Aldean sold his previous company last year for millions, he said, and now runs an “applied AI” startup that helps companies learn how to deploy agents. 

Like all hacker houses, Lift House is part startup workspace, part co-living space. The house is named after both its lift — that is, its elevator — and its mission to uplift tech founders, Aldean said. It’s one of the very few co-living hacker houses to exist in London (compared to San Francisco, where dozens — if not hundreds — are scattered around the city at any given time). 

Lift House is a bet that U.K. founders can build successful companies without mimicking the over-the-top hustle culture of Silicon Valley.  

Founders have described stories of San Francisco hacker houses illegally running in warehouses, throwing full-on galas, or setting up in a tent or espousing punishing, 72-hour sprints typical of the “996” work culture.  

“I don’t expect the performative and over-the-top events will be a thing here,” Aldean said, and pointed to one of London’s most successful AI companies, DeepMind. “They’ve won Nobel prizes and built frontier innovation without any song and dance.”  

Instead, Lift House is part of a trend called “Londonmaxxing,” in which founders attempt to optimize everything the London tech scene offers. The London ecosystem feels less showy and less startup bro-y than San Francisco, but its founders share similar ambitions: success, wealth, and market domination.  

London AI startups have raised $12 billion so far in 2026, out of $14.7 billion raised by all London startups, according to Dealroom. Six companies have raised more than $500 million: Wayve, Superintelligence, ElevenLabs, Recursive, Ineffable Intelligence, and Isomorphic Labs, the latter three of which were founded by DeepMind alumni. 
 
The excitement from AI has boosted the morale of the U.K. tech scene, inspiring a new generation of founders, like those in the Lift House, to take big swings. 

Journaling vs. demo day  

The timeline for living on Lift House is flexible — some people have stayed for a month; others intend to stay for at least six months. They buy their own groceries, Aldean said, although they often cook together and share ingredients. Cleaning is split among the group. Everyone declined to share information about the rent they pay. 

The residents of Lift House aim for a balanced approach toward ambition, each one of them tells me — an almost unheard-of idea by San Francisco startup standards.  

On Sundays, the group will journal together, a practice introduced by David Amor, 28, who runs a brain coaching and training company, helping founders and business leaders understand more about their brain and how it can help optimize business performance. The idea of journaling is to help everyone track how much time they spent in nature that week, how well they ate, and how much they moved their bodies.  

“I’m eating healthier, working out more, and sleeping more,” Luke, 27, who runs an AI-marketing company, said about living in the house. “I always make sure to have lunch now, which is something that is simple, but I wasn’t doing before I lived here.” (Luke asked that his last name be withheld.)  
 
Tuesdays evenings are for volleyball, where the founders play on the house team in a local league.  

After dinner on other evenings, Wan Ying L, 25, who just left an AI startup and is working on a new idea, might play the piano in the living room. Sometimes the group plays Catan or visits art exhibitions together.  

Presence Plumb, 25, is a tech strategist. She likes to host rooftop dinner parties, serving dishes that reflect the different nationalities in the house — from Iraqi to Spanish — while invited founders, researchers, investors, and operators chat about tech trends and investments. 

“It’s a bit calmer, balanced, authentic in a way,” she said of people in the London ecosystem. “They don’t want too much of that only startup tech bro vibe. They want a bit of balance.” 

Each founder follows their own schedules for a typical workday. Amor, for example, is up by 8 a.m. and gives himself exactly 30 seconds after waking up before jumping into his morning work. “I have a clear objective of ‘this is what I want to do in the first half of the day, when there’s no distractions.’” After his morning work routine, he takes a cold shower, “because it increases your dopamine by 250% and that gives me that motivation, that spark,” he said.  

Luke, meanwhile, is up at around 8:30. His co-founder, Varun, 27 (who asked that his last name be withheld), typically travels to the Lift House to co-work, and the duo starts work at around 9 a.m. with a team call.  

Aldean rarely wakes before 10 a.m. unless something big is happening, like a “crazy angel [investor] call,” he said.
 
When asked what makes this house uniquely British rather than a wellness-focused Silicon Valley founder house, Aldean joked: “Well, we drink tea together like Brits, and in SF folks just drink filtered coffee.” 
 
More seriously, he spoke of how British founders face a different kind of pressure than those in the U.S. They must navigate a cultural aversion to risk, an inclination toward humility, and a shame associated with failure. Instead of forgoing sleep for hustle and grind, they deal with what they call the “tall poppy syndrome,” when the media builds one up only to ruthlessly tear them down should they become too successful, investors and founders say. It makes some founders in the ecosystem wary of displaying too many wins.  

Still, Luke said London is a strong choice for an early-stage founder: There’s a good network, ample early capital opportunities, and an option for a life outside of tech. In many ways, it is much more like New York culturally for founders than in San Francisco.  

“London is so diverse that if you look properly enough, you’ll always find something fun to get involved with,” Amor added, “whether that’s a founder-run club, wellness events, [or going] to jazz nights.” 

Luke and Varun largely avoided venture capital funding by taking advantage of the U.K. government’s SEIS/EIS, which is supposed to help attract more angel investments into local startups. “There’s people who will pay basically the same rate of tax if they give us the money versus if they pay income tax,” Luke explained as another reason he liked starting out in London.  

Aldean also feels the London ecosystem is less cutthroat than the Valley. He recalls his days living in a hacker house in the Bay — everyone’s desk had to face the wall, and it was heads-down, product-building. He felt the ecosystem, at times, was too willing to gossip, which is apparently done quite differently in the U.K.  

“There’s nothing like ‘oh my god did you hear that the CTO just, like, did this,’” Aldean said. “It’s like you’re always worried,” he said, that someone would spread negative stories, especially if it benefited them.  

Aldean also thinks London startups, more than Silicon Valley ones, sell into slow-moving large corporations rather than to each other, meaning one could build without having to kiss up or posture to get their peers to like them.  

To the selling point, Varun and Luke mentioned another difference between the U.S. and U.K. ecosystem. “It’s a relatively fleeting market,” Varun said of the U.S. “You get quick wins. Here, it’s hard to close a customer, but if they close, they stay with you longer.” 

Coming to America

Eventually, though, the road for many U.K. startups goes straight to the U.S. 

In the U.K., founders have access to affordable top talent from universities like Oxbridge and a time zone that makes it easier to work with the rest of Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and parts of North America. In the U.S., however, they have access to the world’s largest economy and, most importantly, a lot of investors willing to write large checks, from pre-seed to growth stages.  

“It’s almost like a factory line in a way,” Varun said. “You start here, and then you expand there or vice versa.”  

American investors are also playing a role in luring British talent away from the country. I told the Lift House residents about one startup founder who said a top investor wouldn’t even back the company unless she relocated to the U.S. She ended up doing so, though decided to keep her family based in the U.K. to raise her children.  

“We had an investor in Miami who said the same thing,” Luke said of an investor trying to get him and Varun to move to the U.S. “It’s quite a common practice.” He and Varun have already begun their U.S. expansion, and despite loving London, the duo hasn’t ruled out moving to the U.S. to be closer to their customers.  

That’s the tension bubbling beneath not just the U.K.’s tech ecosystem but most of Europe’s. “I work with a lot of people trying to support the European ecosystem more,” Plumb said. 

Yet, founders “talk about London; everyone is bullish on the country until they get the opportunity to leave,” Aldean added. 

The Lift House lease has about a year left, and there is sentiment in the house to keep it going for as long as they can. After all, there aren’t too many in London, though the city sees many short-term gatherings, like the Solana Hacker House meet-up series. Some of the more public co-living hacker houses are part of a global chain, like the San Francisco-based network The Residency, which expanded into London last year, and BaseJump, which is announcing a London version of its hacker house program soon. 

In 2024, two founders tried the opposite version of the Lift House called “The London Founder House,” which Sifted covered under the headline “The people here don’t want work-life balance.” That home is noted as London’s first-ever hacker house, and though it wound down last year, it left an influence through its concept, events, and connected players around the ecosystem. To even be considered for the London Founder House, one had to have raised at least half a million dollars.  

For Lift House, prospective residents need to show a hobby outside their companies and an interest in fitness. It’s the same pitch many in the Londonmaxxing ecosystem are using to keep people from leaving: That here one can have it all. 

“The culture is to build something that lasts,” Aldean said, “not necessarily burn out chasing a flash.” 

It’s summer. You are sweaty. There’s some unprecedented heat wave that’s even worse than the last unprecedented heat wave. You are uncomfortable. You’re getting sweatier by the second. What do you do?

This predicament — one that’s becoming more and more common — just flat out sucks. But if you have a handheld mini fan on you, the situation can change from “actively horrific” to “less than ideal.” In sweaty circumstances, that’s a miracle.

Over the last few summers, I’ve bought a handful of random mini fans on Amazon or TikTok Shop. While those $10 to $15 devices have become staples in my summer purse, I noticed that premium brands like Shark and Dyson were rolling out their own handheld fans at much higher price points ($100 to $150). As someone who suffers from the SSRI sweats — if you know, you know — I was curious whether these higher-end products are really that much better than the drop-shipped fans I’d bought in summers past.

The verdict is: they’re all pretty good in their own way! But the best one for you depends on your budget, the size of your go-to summer bag (or pockets), and your tolerance for drawing attention to yourself with a large device blowing air in your face.

Most powerful: Dyson HushJet ($99)

I wasn’t surprised to find that the Dyson HushJet is an exceptionally powerful mini fan — this company is best known for vacuums, air purifiers, and hair dryers. Dyson knows how to make stuff that blows air! But at about 7 inches tall, the HushJet is the tallest and heaviest device I tried. It will still fit in most purses, but it’s not pocketable.

The HushJet comes with a travel bag, a charging/desktop stand, a neck lanyard, and a USB-C charger (all of these fans charge via USB-C — woohoo!).

If my desk weren’t directly below an air vent, I could see myself using this while I work, since it functions so well on a desktop. The neck lanyard looks a little dorky, and I imagined myself wearing it while pushing a stroller at Disney World. This is an odd image, since I don’t have children, but maybe the reason I envisioned a hot day out with kids is because the lanyard frees up your hands? Or, maybe it’s because if I had to give one of these devices to a kid and bet they wouldn’t break it, I’d say the Dyson is the most kid-proof? Unfortunately, the lanyard doesn’t really help the fan blow air at you while you wear it — you still have to pick it up to direct it at your face.

The HushJet is more powerful than any other mini fan I tried, but that power comes with some noise. Luckily, it has five different power settings, and the lower ones are quieter.

Most versatile: Shark ChillPill ($149)

The Shark ChillPill is the most expensive fan of the bunch, but to be fair, it also does the most. The ChillPill comes with three attachments: a fan, a water mister, and a cooling plate that you touch to your wrist or temple to help you cool down. Like the Dyson HushJet, the ChillPill can sit up on its own for desktop use. It’s about 4 inches long and about double the width of the other options because of its dual-cylinder design.

I chose to bring the ChillPill with me to a softball tournament, since I knew I’d already be sweaty enough that a mister would benefit me without making me look unnecessarily damp (there is no universe in which I would not appear damp at an all-day outdoor event in the summer).

You just have to pour a tiny bit of water into the attachment and it works great. The cooling plate is interesting, but I personally found the fan more immediately effective — plus, it has ten speeds!

I might be more inspired to bring the ChillPill with me in my bag if it came with a case for all of its accessories — I wasn’t really sure what to do with the extra little components. I mostly used the ChillPill with its fan attachment, but I was impressed by the product design when it comes to changing out attachments. There’s a locking mechanism, which you toggle when you want to remove or add a new attachment. It feels secure enough that it would be pretty difficult for an attachment to accidentally fall off or something.

I understand why the ChillPill is as wide as it is — there’s probably a lot of technical components in there that make the 3-in-1 design possible. The design works for outdoor events like music festivals, sports games, or beach days, but I prefer smaller fans for other circumstances, like when you’re the only one at the bar who thinks it’s a little hot inside, and you feel weird about that.

Good enough: JISULIFE 3-in-1 Portable Fan ($13)

The JISULIFE 3-in-1 Portable Fan was the first mini fan I ever bought, and it’s served me well for the last three years — it still works just as good as new. I’ve taken it on vacations without AC and found it endlessly valuable. It has a flashlight, though not one that’s any better than your phone flashlight, and a USB plug-in to charge your phone. Of all the fans I tested, the JISULIFE is the weakest (though still decent), and it can be kind of annoying to flip open. Then again, it has little bear ears on it. Does Dyson randomly put little bear ears on its fans? I didn’t think so.

This product isn’t going to knock your socks off. The charging is slow, yet effective. The fan is fine. The light is kind of dim. But it gets the job done well enough that it’s accompanied me on a few “glamping” trips and a trip to Paris during a heat wave. Sure, those trips all took place before I had tried any of these other fans, but I wasn’t sitting around thinking, “Gee, I sure wish I had a better fan.” (Rather, I was reflecting on how the most American thing about me is that I love AC.)

The fan is about 4.5 inches when folded, and about 8 inches when using the fan.

Best overall: This random fan from Amazon ($15)

While over $250 worth of review unit mini fans sat at home, I couldn’t stop reaching for this random MACMORE fan from Amazon when I went out. It’s definitely some sort of sketchy drop-shipping situation — the images on the listing all look very obviously edited. The company, MACMORE, only lists two products (both mini fans) on Amazon. But what can I say? I love this little thing. I even bedazzled it. (Bedazzling kit sold separately, but highly recommended to maximize whimsy.)

At 4 inches tall, this fan is both the smallest and lightest one I tried. It’s not as strong as the Shark or Dyson fans, but it works well enough that I’m not wishing the fan were stronger. It comes with a removable clip, so you can attach it to your shirt or the strap of a crossbody bag to keep cool, hands-free. Like every other fan, it makes some sound, but it’s small and quiet enough that I don’t feel like I’m drawing attention to myself when I use it in public.

When it comes down to it, the size (and low price) is probably what makes me love this fan so much. It takes up less space in my purse than my keys, and it fits in a pocket too, so it’s become a staple. But really, this all comes down to personal preference. I’m optimizing for discretion, but maybe you’ll choose to optimize for a fan with the most features or that has little bear ears on it.