AI gets smarter, real girlfriends get more expensive

Original Author: Jerry; Deep Tide TechFlow

Over the past two years, AI has driven down the cost of many things. Coding, designing, and video editing have all become tasks you can accomplish by typing a few words into an input box.

But in San Francisco, where AI has created the most wealth, the price of one service is moving in the opposite direction, rising quietly, unrecorded in any price statistics.

According to a Forbes cover story on June 7, a woman using the pseudonym Meida Marek was a low-level employee in the financial industry a few years ago. As she told Forbes, her career change began one day when she started thinking that AI would eventually threaten her job.

Thinking it over, she decided not to wait and pivoted to making money from those working on AI. Now she charges $3,500 an hour and is booked up months in advance.

Her business, in essence, is high-end companionship. A complete girlfriend experience—dating, chatting, accompanying to events. The price list is on her own website, clearly marked, fair and square.

This business itself is nothing new. What's new is the price.

Practitioners interviewed by Forbes said that five years ago, earning over $1,000 an hour in this circle was rare. Now, $1,000 can't be found on the price lists of top players; $3,000 is just the starting price, and even at that, you have to wait in line.

This salary increase, in any legitimate industry, would be enough for the Federal Reserve to hold a meeting to study it.

We've been hearing for two years about Nvidia's stock churning out millionaires and AI company employees cashing out an amount equivalent to what others earn in a decade. But where does the money flow after it reaches these people? No one has looked closely before.

This Forbes report essentially reveals one of these channels, and the people in this channel are earning more decently than most startups riding the AI hype.

Who are the people who can book up months of a $3,500-an-hour schedule?

Single Until Series B

A popular self-deprecating phrase has emerged in Silicon Valley in the past two years: "Single until Series B."

According to Forbes, this phrase started as a joke among founders and has since spread widely, now printed on T-shirts and hats.

Jokes become popular because they often ring true. In this logic, dating is a postponable item, with priority given to product, fundraising, and hiring. It can wait until the company reaches a certain milestone.

Friends at major domestic tech companies probably don't need this explained.

Meanwhile, the money in the hands of this group postponing romance is increasing at a rare speed. In October last year, OpenAI conducted an employee stock sale. According to US media reports like Business Insider, over 600 people participated, cashing out an average of approximately $11 million each. Similar wealth-creation stories have occurred regularly in the Bay Area over the past two years.

Lots of money, little time, and social needs compressed into the gaps of a packed schedule.

For this group, dating apps present another optimization problem with poor returns. Matching, small talk, aligning schedules, being stood up—every step has a friction cost. More troublesome is that even if they do get a date, the other person likely can't engage with topics they are genuinely interested in.

So, the market provides a solution: pay directly for certainty.

On the price list of another practitioner in the Forbes report, a full day costs $23,000, and a weekend costs $30,000. Even at this price, there's a waiting list.

For someone who has just cashed out millions of dollars, this calculation is simple enough; the difficulty is getting a reservation.

Forbes also mentioned an unexpected yet logical detail: many clients buying high-end companionship services mainly want to... chat.

Chat about technology, about the future, late into the night. Certain unmentionable activities seem more like an afterthought. Some of these clients spend their days teaching AI how to speak, and after work, they pay to listen to a real person talk.

This detail actually rewrites the pricing logic of the entire business.

If the main service is conversation, then an additional variable enters the pricing equation: what can you talk about, and how deep can you go?

The market for beauty and physical appearance has been roughly established for centuries, but the value of conversation has never been priced.

So, in San Francisco, what kind of conversation is most valuable?

The Intelligence Premium

Among the practitioners interviewed by Forbes, someone has already articulated the answer: "The ones who charge the most are never the prettiest girls, but the ones who are both pretty and smart."

As for how to monetize intelligence, they've developed a complete set of strategies.

The main customer acquisition channel is X (formerly Twitter). They regularly post AI-related content, including industry trends and technical opinions. One practitioner described the funnel's mechanics to Forbes:

"There's always some guy from Nvidia who chimes in, saying, 'What, you actually know what a GPU is? Oh my God.'" And then, the business comes.

In other industries, this is called content marketing. Precise targeting, high conversion rates, and zero customer acquisition cost. Growth teams at many startups would dream of such metrics.

And the conversations at the table are genuinely technical, not just for show. Forbes writes that gifts from clients include AI-generated artwork and even hardware specifically configured for them to run open-source models at home...

Giving flowers or bags is so last era. The new wealthy in Silicon Valley express their feelings with computing power.

These gifts reveal a more granular detail. A client who gives you hardware for running open-source models is doing so because the things they discuss in this paid relationship are what they are genuinely passionate about but have nowhere else to express.

This gets to the core of the business.

The wealth of these AI nouveau riche clients is an advantage in the dating market, but their interests are a disadvantage. When talking to a regular date about models, GPUs, and longevity research, the other person's eyes start to glaze over within three minutes... They have to translate themselves into a "normal" person just to get through a meal.

Over time, "not having to translate yourself" becomes something money can't easily buy.

The reason this demand can command such astronomical prices lies on the supply side. In the dating market, there's never a shortage of beauty, or beautifully priced beauty. What's scarce is beauty that can engage with topics like large language models. The supply for this specific category is, in a sense, close to zero.

Premiums never reward effort; they reward scarcity.

So, this companionship business has an unusual structure. In a typical knowledge-payment model, the student pays the teacher for lessons. Here, it's the opposite: the person who understands the technology the most pays for a student who can understand his lecture.

Practitioners in the Forbes report have named this strategy "nerd-first." First, you are kin; then comes business.

Meida, the woman who transitioned from finance mentioned at the beginning, provides a live demonstration of this strategy through her social media accounts.

Clicking on her profile, there aren't many selfies. Her timeline is filled with various questions and polls. On May 1st this year, she asked her followers: If we encountered aliens, would you prefer them to be AI or biological? The two options she wrote were "Silicon-based life" and "Carbon-based."

Her followers voted for the carbon-based ones. Her tech-nerd clients are probably also voting with their wallets for someone with shared interests.

Silicon Gets Cheaper, Carbon Gets Pricier

Companionship is a lasting business about human nature.

And everyone knows the price on the silicon side. AI companion apps like Replika have a subscription price of around $20 a month, available 24/7, always agreeable. With major model companies engaged in price wars, this figure will only go lower.

On the carbon side, the high-end companionship mentioned in this article has a ceiling hourly rate of $6,000. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, this one hour approaches the entire monthly income of an average American family. And there's still a waiting list.

In Forbes' original interview, a companion practitioner with a master's degree laid it bare, saying AI is turning real human connection into a luxury good.

Coming from her, this statement feels particularly credible because her clients are precisely the people in the world who understand AI best. Insiders are the first to see a shortage, and insiders are also the first to stock up.

The capital market has already bought into this logic this year.

In February, a term called HALO was popular in the US stock market. It refers to "Heavy Asset, Low Obsolescence" companies—businesses that are kill-proof regardless of how AI evolves. Money fled from software stocks and flowed into McDonald's and Walmart.

The companionship business is the beauty version of the same logic, without the need to report earnings.

The last time San Francisco saw a scene like this was in 1849. Gold prospectors from all over the world flooded in. The gold mines were eventually depleted, and the people dispersed. But the winners of that boom included very few prospectors; one who made pants for the prospectors was Levi Strauss.

Every wave of wealth frenzy re-prices the things around us. This time, it might be human beings themselves.

The AI story isn't over yet, and gold is still being struck in the tech industry. But one thing is certain: for every penny silicon gets cheaper, carbon gets another penny more expensive.