Events
Rally events, and the rest of AI SF
Builders Night, BSOTA, Speaker Series, and what else is on around the city.
Wednesday, June 10
10 AM - 6 PM
The Cursor team takes over a North Beach cafe with drop-in coffee and co-working tables. Bring a charged laptop; attendees get Cursor credits.
5 PM - 9 PM
Most retrieval agents fail silently, pulling plausible but incomplete context. This hands-on workshop teaches you to build agents that recognize retrieval failures and self-correct through query rewriting, re-search, or stopping decisions using practical quality signals.
5:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Dinner and papers with Kalpit Dixit, ex-AWS Bedrock, on agents with structured access to two million research papers. Short talks, long Q&A.
9 AM - 11 AM
Small group of seed-stage founders having structured breakfast conversations with peers at your exact stage. The whole point is honest dialogue and relationships that stick around after you leave.
9:30 AM - 8:30 PM
A full-day build on model routing, evals, and cost-aware tooling at the AWS Builder Loft. Demos and judging at night.
Thursday, June 11
3 PM - 5 PM
The Lean Startup author on governance for AI companies, in a fireside with SOSV's Po Bronson. Free with registration.
5 PM - 9 PM
Evening of hands-on building at a16z's SF office with free Cursor credits and the team in the room. Show up solo or with a friend, ship something in a few hours, and demo what you made.
6 AM - 8 AM
You'll build a multimodal search system that answers questions about earnings calls and returns audio clips, transcripts, and news articles from a single query. Hands-on work with Gemini embeddings, Qdrant's production retrieval APIs, and real financial data from Benzinga.
6 PM - 8:30 PM
Artificial Analysis found coding agent cost per task varies by more than 30x, presented with guests from Cursor and Cognition. Panel at 7:30.
6:30 PM - 8:30 PM
A curated dinner for Series A/B AI founders scaling fast, featuring peers who've been through fundraising and GTM at your stage. Three courses at one of the city's best venues with the builders behind some of the country's fastest-growing companies.
8:30 AM - 6:30 PM
Full-day conference on vector search, retrieval, and agentic AI with Llamaindex, Neo4j, Google DeepMind, and others shipping real systems. Solid lineup if you're building memory, edge AI, or rethinking how systems retrieve and reason at scale.
9 AM - 12 PM
Retrieval in agentic systems works nothing like classic RAG where it's one fixed step. This panel with Qdrant, deepset, LlamaIndex, Cognee, and n8n debates how agents should actually decide when to search, what tool to use, and whether results are good enough.
9:30 AM - 7 PM
Build something real with ClickHouse and Hex in a single day, with partner engineers at the expert bar keeping you moving. Breakfast, lunch, demos, and cash prizes make this worth your Saturday, especially if you want to test an idea against other builders.
Friday, June 12
5 PM - 8:30 PM
A World Cup watch party crossed with a tech mixer, hosted by Rootly AI, Twingate, MongoDB, and Thine. Space is limited.
Saturday, June 13
9 AM - 7:30 PM
A one-day hackathon on patient agency in healthcare, sponsored by xAI, Vercel, and Cursor, with over $10k in prizes. Demos at 6.
Monday, June 15
1 AM - 4 AM
Sydney's AI builders converge for the fourth edition of this meetup, bringing engineers from startups and enterprises actually shipping in production. Talks still being announced, but the track record suggests solid speakers and the kind of conversations that only happen when you're around people solving the same problems.
Tuesday, June 16
11 AM - 2 PM
Vercel's throwing a proper party at the Outernet with lightning talks, live demos from Built in London winners, and hands-on builds. The night before Ship Week kicks off, this is where the people actually shipping gather.
7 PM - 10 PM
Frontier researchers gathering in the AGI House living room to talk shop over cheese, croissants, and wine. Low-pressure format: bring slides, use the whiteboard, or just vibe and hear what others are working on.
9:30 AM - 5:30 PM
Two days of talks and hands-on workshops from scientists and engineers shipping AI-powered lab automation, covering software, hardware, and workflows moving faster than ever. Day one focuses on best practices from leading labs and founders; day two gets you hands-on with tools like Opentrons robotics and other partners building the future of automated science.
Thursday, June 18
9:30 AM - 5 PM
This hands-on workshop walks you through embedding OpenClaw into a live mobile and web app, from setup to first message with production patterns included. You'll leave with a working integration, $100 in credits, and the knowledge to deploy it yourself.
Monday, June 22
3:30 PM - 5 PM
Sridhar Ramaswamy brings 15 years of Google leadership and Neeva's founding directly into conversation about Snowflake's AI direction. This fireside chat hits the rare intersection of search, advertising infrastructure, and modern data platforms through someone who shaped all three.
Tuesday, June 23
3:30 AM - 4:30 AM
Wednesday, June 24
10 AM - 8 PM
Korean robotics and manufacturing AI companies are showcasing at scale in the Valley this June, with 40 exhibitors plus structured matchmaking and pitching. Solid if you're building in physical AI or scouting talent and innovation from teams hitting it hard in Asia.
Thursday, June 25
5:30 PM - 8 PM
Six hand-picked AI founders pitch their boldest ideas to investors and the Bay's sharpest operators, with the crowd voting for champions live. Sharp demos, expert judges, and real momentum on the line.
5:30 PM - 8 PM
Ten to fifteen founders get two minutes each to demo what they're actually building, followed by VC feedback in a no-pitch, high-energy format. This is where you show working product, not slides, alongside the Bay's most active investors and builders.
Monday, June 29
4 PM - 5:30 PM
Kevin Weil shaped ChatGPT, Codex, and the OpenAI API as CPO, then led the science division. This fireside chat with South Park Commons hits the -1 to Now series exploring what comes next for builders thinking big.
Past events
Most networking events end when people leave. Keep in Touch adds structure to what breaks: matching you with relevant people upfront, then using Signal the next morning to actually follow up.
Monday co-working for AI builders. Two hours of focused build time with a share-back round to close.
Bi-weekly community event for builders working with agentic coding tools, with techniques going back to a shared repo at github.com/bsota/collective. RSVPs are open.
The first wave of AI rebuilt the digital 15% of the economy. The next wave runs on the other 85%: manufacturing, energy, infrastructure. Atharva Atre (Niantic Spatial) walks through the five technical layers it runs on, from simulated training environments to spatial intelligence.
Monday co-working for AI builders. Two hours of focused build time with a share-back round to close.
Builders Night
Monday · 2026-05-11 · 6:30 PM - 9:00 PMMonday co-working for AI builders. Two hours of focused build time with a share-back round to close.
Most AI benchmarks ask whether a model is smart. HumaneBench asks whether it's actually good for the person using it. The team tested how models hold up when users are stressed or vulnerable, and found that 67% of the time the model stops looking out for the user. Talk on the methodology, then a working session on what a benchmark like this would look like for your own product. Best for builders who want to ship AI that doesn't quietly fail the users who need it most.
Spend a Saturday going from tokenization to training a working language model from scratch. You'll write the core architecture, understand the math behind attention mechanisms, and leave with code you actually understand. Best for engineers who want to stop treating LLMs as black boxes.
A deep dive into the design decisions that shape agent architectures, from tool use patterns to memory systems to orchestration strategies.
Monday co-working for AI builders. Two hours of focused build time with a share-back round to close.
Monday co-working for AI builders. Two hours of focused build time with a share-back round to close.
Monday co-working for AI builders. Two hours of focused build time with a share-back round to close.
A Rally SF hackathon. Why can't the most technical community on Earth coordinate dinner?
Monday co-working for AI builders. Two hours of focused build time with a share-back round to close.
Monday co-working for AI builders. Two hours of focused build time with a share-back round to close.
BSOTA #2. Hands-on session exploring agentic workflows and collaborative AI building.
This session explores AI alignment through Anthropic's Constitutional AI framework. We'll dig into the 84-page constitution that guides Claude's behavior, the difference between rules and dispositions, and how Constitutional AI compares to RLHF. Co-facilitated by Anup Gosavi and Emily Hough-Kovacs. Pre-read: "Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback" (Bai et al., 2022).
Monday co-working for AI builders. Two hours of focused build time with a share-back round to close.
Monday co-working for AI builders. Two hours of focused build time with a share-back round to close.
Justin Lebar (ex-NVIDIA, Google TPU) broke down GPU architecture fundamentals and what they mean for the economics of AI inference. Standing room only.
Weekly co-working session for AI builders. Laptops out, projects in progress, peers to get unstuck with.
Our inaugural BSOTA session. Everett Kleven led the group through shared vocabulary, live demos, and breakout discussions on agentic computing workflows with Claude Code. 93 RSVPs, 40 attended.
We surveyed practical approaches to long-context LLMs including RoPE scaling, sparse attention, and state-space alternatives, then mapped the real engineering tradeoffs: when expanding context windows makes sense versus when retrieval-augmented generation still wins. The takeaway: accepting tokens isn't the same as using them well.
We examined how linear directions in a model's activation space correspond to specific character traits like sycophancy, hallucination propensity, and moral reasoning. The group discussed what personality means for language models and the implications for alignment, safety, and developer tools. Paper: "Persona Vectors" (Chen et al., 2025).
Our first session explored the foundational paper behind modern generative AI. We broke down how diffusion models gradually add noise to data and learn to reverse the process, why this approach outperformed GANs and VAEs, and the connections to Latent Diffusion and Consistency Models. Paper: "Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models" (Ho et al., 2020).
Our inaugural session explored DeepSeek-R1 — how reinforcement learning for reasoning, GRPO, and distillation are reshaping what open-source models can do.
Don't miss the next one.
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