TL;DR: In San Francisco, a rift is growing between tech people who work in AI and those who don’t. The new AI wealth—which has helped drive up housing prices and the cost of living in an already expensive city—is enough to make even a six-figure salary feel somewhat lackluster. And it could be a bellwether of how AI widens class inequality beyond SF.

What happened: They say comparison is the thief of joy, and nowhere is that truer right now than in San Francisco. The sky-high income (and valuable equity) that AI workers earn is leaving even those that make $180,000 a year feeling insecure, according to a New York Times report.

To put it into perspective, a $180,000 annual salary puts you in roughly the top 20% of US household incomes. But it’s still a sliver of what OpenAI and Anthropic are paying some of their staff. Average yearly stock-based compensation for OpenAI employees, for example, reached $1.5 million in 2025. As one engineer told the NYT: “I feel a little bit like I’m not good enough to live here anymore because I don’t work at an AI company.”

Keeping up with the AI Joneses: One area where the influx of AI wealth has had the biggest impact: real estate. The median home sale price in SF as of May was $1.7 million—16% higher than the same time last year and almost quadruple the national median. The city has even snatched the title of having the most expensive rent from NYC, with the average apartment rent hitting $3,827 per month. (The national average is $1,742.)

The pre-IPO tech elite: Thousands of already well-paid AI workers could see their equity soar once Anthropic and OpenAI go public. (The NYT projects that these two IPOs, combined with the recent SpaceX listing, could mint about 20 new billionaires.) That might also help explain all the AI lab talent shuffling we’ve seen in just the last few weeks, with several top AI researchers from Google leaving for its not-yet-public competitors.

Bottom line: It used to be that working in tech at all meant you were near the very top of the socioeconomic ladder. The (perhaps worryingly big) AI boom has made that less true than it used to be for non-AI tech workers—and the widening income gap within Silicon Valley doesn’t exactly bode well for the majority of American workers who’ve never even touched a six-figure salary. —WK

Apple’s hidden magic dots could fix your motion sickness

Picture this: You’re on deadline for a big project, but you also need to head to a family dinner, and the only way to file on time is to finish from the back of a moving car. You crack open the doc, get three sentences in, and start to feel queasy—the unmistakable sign that you’re about to be unproductive and very sick. If you’ve ever been stuck in a situation like this, Apple has a hidden feature that worked for me and could work for you.

Turns out the fix has been buried in your device’s settings this whole time. It’s called Vehicle Motion Cues, an accessibility feature that scatters a dozen little dots around your screen and animates them to match the car or train’s turns, brakes, and lurches.

How to enable this feature: Go to Settings → Accessibility → Motion → Vehicle Motion Cues. You can choose to toggle it on or off manually, or opt for the Automatically in Vehicle option for the device to show the dots when vehicle motion is detected. You can also access this feature through your iPhone’s Control Center after it’s been turned on once. Alternatively, set up an Accessibility Shortcut to quickly turn it on or off.

The dots worked for me both in the car and on the subway. Since it works on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, the only thing left to feel sick about is your deadline itself. —LC

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HR probably isn’t your favorite department to deal with at work, but Amazon apparently found a way to make it worse—by literally removing the “human” from “human resources.” The company has been gutting on-site HR at its warehouses, according to a report from Fast Company, instead routing workers to an AI chatbot named Aza (which one worker called “ChatGPT in an Amazon t-shirt”).

The result is a “Kafkaesque loop”: The bot tells you to find an HR person to resolve an issue; the HR person then tells you to use the bot. According to one of the workers interviewed, the HR desk is now basically collecting dust—the last time he tried to talk to someone in the department, he was told that the HR person would only be in between 9 and 10am. Naturally, workers have been venting on Reddit, and some report that they’ve struggled to get approval for bereavement leave and other accommodations through the app. Which highlights one of the key problems: When you have an issue with the HR chatbot, whom do you report it to? —WK

Chaos Brewing Meter: /5