Jeffrey Escobar’s family all went to the France vs. England World Cup match. He stayed home.
The 25-year-old from Miami doesn’t get why the people around him aren’t building more with AI. He sees his friends hang out or watch Netflix. He tells them, “I can’t leave my desk.”
“It’s like I’m in a dark room, everybody can’t see anything, and I’m the only one holding a light,” Escobar.
It’s an isolating feeling. Escobar said it was hard to talk with other guys and go on dates with women. “I just feel like they don’t understand me,” he said.
For now, Escobar said his only community is the cofounder of his AI app startup, Addicting Elements. And it’s not like he doesn’t socialize, Escobar said; he takes meetings for much of the day.
Jeffrey Escobar
Escobar is one of many AI power users racing to keep up with the rapidly changing technology. For these enthusiasts, the feeling can be overwhelming, pushing them into longer and longer vibe-coding sessions.
Meanwhile, some of the wider population (especially younger people) are souring on AI. Others don’t hate the tech — they just don’t use it. For the AI aficionados, these people can be difficult to talk to. The isolation creeps in.
It’s lonely out there for AI’s biggest fans.
When no one wants to talk about AI
Kyle Smitherman suspects his love of AI contributed to his breakup.
The 26-year-old from Houston said he went “all in” on building his consulting service, UnlockAI. He bootstrapped the business and spent long periods of time working on it, which he said caused strain. It also wasn’t “very easy to explain” to his now ex-girlfriend.
Smitherman compared his AI business to a more practical one: mowing lawns. His girlfriend would’ve understood the lawn-mowing, he said, because the work is clear-cut.
“I’m creating agentic workflows, learning graph loops, and running loops with agents,” he said. “She’s like: ‘You’re doing what?'”
For Smitherman, AI feels like the dot-com boom or the first iPhone; for his family and friends, it’s inconsequential. “It almost looks like I’m going crazy,” he said.
Kyle Smitherman
Learning anything and everything about AI can challenge a relationship. It may require burning the midnight oil or a constant drifting eye to the agent on your phone. Indeed, some couples previously told Business Insider that they were in “Claude-gap” relationships.
For others, it can cause rifts between friends.
32-year-old Vaibhav Kumar recalled a dinner at which he talked about the Chinese model Kimi K3. His friend “flipped out,” Kumar said, calling AI and data centers “evil.”
“It ruined the whole dinner,” said the flight physics engineer from San Francisco and Las Vegas. “It brought the mood down.”
Kumar is feeling lonely. He has one friend who’s into AI, but most of the others don’t want to hear about it. Meanwhile, he’s filling his time keeping up with AI news, which he described as “drinking from a water hose, and the hose just keeps getting bigger.”
There’s “no world outside it,” he said.
How to find your (real-life) AI friends
There are communities of AI heads out there, from techie online havens like Elon Musk’s X to local meet-ups. You just have to seek them out (and maybe step away from your monitor).
Jonathan Linton described his search by comparing two “frontiers.”
The first “frontier” was Myanmar, where he worked for five years beginning in 2013, as the country opened up economically. People descended on its cities, he said, creating a sense of community.
Jonathan Linton
The second “frontier” is AI, he said. The 39-year-old works as an AI lead at an accounting firm and runs the consulting business Fresh Coast AI on the side. He said it feels similar to his time in Myanmar, but without the support of like-minded people nearby.
“You feel like you’re on an island,” he said. “I learned: You have to put in more effort into finding a community of people who are doing similar things to you.”
Linton sought out founder events in his home city of Milwaukee and found friends online.
And while the AI community often skews male, it’s not only the tech bros feeling the isolation.
Alyssa Clarcq, a 31-year-old CPA from Tampa, said that AI felt like “this huge secret that no one wants to hear about.” So, she started posting her travails with LLMs on TikTok and LinkedIn.
Alyssa Clarcq
While TikToks and virtual meetups may “scratch the itch,” they don’t solve her loneliness.
“I am very limited in who I can have a face-to-face conversation with,” she said.
Clarcq did meet up with one AI-loving friend she met on TikTok.
“We’ve hung out once or twice,” she said. “I at least have someone I can go get coffee with.”
