At the Richmond Neighborhood Center in San Francisco, more than 200 people are on the waitlist for the food pantry. The center is just a couple of miles west of “AI Alley,” where a cluster of major AI companies take in billions of dollars in investments and pay out high salaries to employees — in turn making home prices and rent payments soar.

San Francisco serves as a prime example of how the roaring AI industry is helping drive economic growth more broadly, but masking the economic inequality of lower-and-middle-income families.

And San Francisco reflects the same patterns happening on a national scale: In the first three months of the year, the US economy overall grew at a solid 2.1% annualized rate, largely due to businesses ramping up AI-related investments, according to Commerce Department data.

Yet consumer sentiment is languishing near record lows over wartime price spikes, and the bottom quarter of Americans on the income spectrum have seen the weakest wage growth of any other cohort this year, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

“The inequalities in the neighborhood have just grown and grown and grown,” Yves Xavier, community programs director at the Richmond Neighborhood Center, told CNN. “We can’t draw a direct line to AI’s impact and say ‘That’s exactly it’ because it’s been happening for a while, but it doesn’t exactly take a rocket scientist to see how that’s widening the inequalities in a city already dealing with those issues.”

Source: CNN