Cuddle puddles at the Love Symposium, at The Commons in San Francisco. A group of tech executives, app developers and Silicon Valley philosophers is seeking to streamline the messy matters of the heart. — Jason Henry/The New York Times
Cody Zervas was looking for his wife. He used to be engaged, but then his fiancee broke it off, and now he was ready to explore new opportunities. He desired a one-in-a-million match, which meant he needed to enlarge his dating pool.
In 2022, he logged onto Twitter and offered a bounty of US$20,000 (RM81,340) to the person who introduced him to his future bride. The prize would increase each year until she appeared.
Zervas remains single, but his “wife bounty” found him another kind of partner. It led to an introduction to Jake Kozloski, founder and CEO of Keeper, a matchmaking startup built around artificial intelligence. Now, Zervas is the company’s chief product officer, playing data Cupid for other straight people with exacting standards and money to spend. In November, he travelled to San Francisco to represent Keeper at Love Symposium, a freewheeling gathering of “earnest founders, experts and intellectuals” with an interest in “proliferating healthy connection at scale.”
I reached out to Zervas when I saw him on the symposium schedule, promoting the idea of “love at first match”. He became my entry point to a certain way of thinking about human relationships: as problems that could be measured, optimised and solved.
Over the course of the weekend – and for US$200 (RM813) per person – attendees heard presentations on relationship outcome prediction technology, investigated “metarational” marriage practices and joined a flash matchmaking session at SF Commons.
Among them were a Massachusetts Institute of Technology-trained philosopher-builder generating human digital “twins” for dating simulations; a woman plotting to print her own currency under the pseudonym Ayn Forger; a British “mind coach” who offers intuition sessions; a social media manager developing a religion for people with autism; and Ann Pierce, a startup founder who organised the event.
Silicon Valley has been mediating human relationships for decades, reshaping our private lives with its speculative bubbles and ideological currents. Love Symposium, now in its second year, has emerged as the romantic discourse has reached a tenor of disaster. There is a marriage “crisis”, a loneliness “epidemic”, a demographic “collapse”. People are flirting with AI boyfriends and virtually undressing strangers on the social platform X.
Could more technology help?
Finding love in a ‘thinky town’
Pierce greeted me at the Commons on a Friday afternoon. She said she once co-founded a startup in the dating space that allowed users to upload photographs of themselves and receive crowdsourced ratings on how competent or fun they appeared.
After her co-founder bought her out of the company she semi-retired and took up an interest in the subject of interpersonal conflict.
Through Bay Area philosophy groups, she encountered Matthew Fisher, an AI researcher and engineer concerned with the loneliness of constant digital connection. The human intimacy “search problem,” as he called it, meant that compatible partners were swiping in obscurity, unable to find one another. He wanted the next technological wave to be “a bridge to other humans, not a Skinner box,” he said.
A URL was secured, and the symposium was born.
“This is a very thinky town,” Pierce said. But new philosophical crosscurrents were emphasising emotion, spirituality and the general idea that “we’re more than just a brain on a stick”, she said.
Pierce, 38, is a cerebral and warm host, and she prepared the space in an adorable style, punctuated by AI-generated images of robots and nymphs. The place felt like the setting for a quirky tale of nerds putting their heads together to find love.
But in the background was the buzz of seed funding and political power. Participants spoke of developing psychometrics to make objective measures of the mysteries of human relations, a promise of tenderness that could also devolve quickly into the brutal ranking of human beings.
I met Zervas and two of his Keeper colleagues, men in their early 30s. Before he became Keeper’s chief business officer, Wes Myers shot missiles for the US Army and earned an MBA at the University of Pennsylvania. Hunter Ash, Keeper’s social media manager, posted frequently on X about what he described as an interest in psychology.
Keeper’s goal is to understand its users so well that it can connect them with their soulmates on the first try.
The application, which can take hours to complete, asks users for their height, ancestral background, SAT score and their feelings about entrepreneurs. They can chose from an exhaustive list of political affiliations (conservative or progressive, Zionist or anti-Zionist, neoliberal or neo-Nazi) and select their partner’s “ideal” ethnicity. The system can assess their cheekbone prominence, jaw strength or body-fat percentage from a scanned photo, and analyze their application to estimate an IQ score.
Users who fail to make a match, or who bomb on a date, receive constructive feedback. The system, the men say, is intended to go beyond a user’s “general mate value factor” to honour each user’s idiosyncratic desires. Ash, who writes in Keeper’s institutional voice on X, provided an example from his research.
“If the woman is about half a standard deviation more agreeable than the man, that’s the optimal point for relationship durability,” he said, to which I must have emitted an observable psychometric signal.
“Look at your face,” Zervas said. “You’re horrified.”
Can AI help?
The talks continued for three days.
Other strategies for human flourishing were proposed and debated. Fisher, the researcher and engineer, spoke of highly personalised AI agents that could potentially work to match compatible people when they walked into a bar by “amplifying her laugh” from across the room or “slightly brightening the light above him when she looked his way”.
Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico who advises Keeper, suggested that monogamous human relationships could be threatened by AI, but perhaps also strengthened by the development of artificial threesome partners. A human augmentation technologist, Dünya Baradari, proposed that social media data could be uploaded to an AI avatar that could court virtually on your behalf, reducing the chance of incompatible first dates.
Christine Peterson, a forecaster who coined the term “open source” software, delivered a talk on how “men and women should date differently,” a view she said was based on insights from human evolution. She described a protocol in which men pursued the women they most desired while women accepted numerous dates, never “chasing the boys” but delaying sex indefinitely until they had locked down an acceptable partner. Then she took questions.
“Honestly, your strategy scares me a little,” an entrepreneur in the audience named Quinn Sure said.
Dating as an Asian man in America, Sure said, had soured him on such status games, a sentiment that earned him approving snaps from the crowd.
“I prefer that someone just likes me for who I am,” he said. To which Peterson replied: “Oh, well!”
On Sunday afternoon, Love Symposium organisers persuaded a couple who had met on Hinge and planned to go on their first date at a nearby coffee shop to instead stage the encounter in front of an audience. Fisher called it “a great reminder of the messy and emotional realities of the human experience of dating that we’re trying to improve.”
A research scientist and a standup comedian walked into a symposium. They were accidentally matching, in black jeans and gray long-sleeve shirts. We watched them negotiate their connection, trying to figure out if they liked each other and how much they ought to show it. Then we interrogated them.
“What are your relationships with your mothers?”
“Do you want kids?”
“Somebody open a prediction market!”
“We would like it if you slow-danced for us,” Pierce said.
The audience felt giddy with the possibility that we could engineer a romance with a few simple commands. When the symposium ended, they decided they were better off as friends. – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
