Rally events, and the rest of AI SF

Talks & panels · Workshop / hands-on

The third edition focuses on fleet orchestration, scaling data pipelines, and decentralized intelligence across heterogeneous robots. Hands-on workshop with OpenRobOps lets you work directly with monitoring and remote operation tooling.

Talks & panels

Half-day technical seminar during Open Source AI Week with speakers like Illia Polosukhin and Peter Norvig discussing open models, post-transformer architectures, and the future of AI research. Talks run 2:30pm-5:15pm with kimbap provided beforehand.

Talks & panels

Ankush Gola, LangChain's CTO, breaks down why traces matter for agent development and when to move beyond evals into post-training. Technical conversation with the person shipping the infrastructure most AI builders are actually using.

Workshop / hands-on

Hands-on workshop testing emerging agent infrastructure patterns before they hit your stack. Four technical sessions led by teams shipping AI developer tools, with live demos and time to build alongside other engineers.

Mixer / networking

Curated pickleball for AI founders and their investors, seed through Series A stage. Three hours of courts and dinner to actually talk shop with people shipping real products.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Strukto, Infron, and XTrace break down the open-source infrastructure stack actually powering production agents: virtual filesystems, inference orchestration, and observability tools. Talks cover virtual terminals, GPU commitment strategies, and memory management from founders and engineers shipping real systems.

Workshop / hands-on · Mixer / networking

Bring a real workflow or customer problem and you'll build a working proof with other builders, test it same-day, and walk out with a focused seven-day GTM plan. The session moves from guided build to shipping strategy, ending with demos and direct feedback from the room.

Workshop / hands-on

Get hands-on with Nasiko to see exactly where your coding agents are burning tokens and how context compaction cuts waste. Bring your laptop and favorite tool, connect it to this open-source platform, and leave with real optimization strategies.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

European founders are flooding into SF right now, and tonight you'll see what they're building before anyone else. Live pitches, straight talk from YC alumni about the transatlantic grind, and the investors actually paying attention to Europe's best.

Talks & panels · Demo night

StepFun's new open-weights flagship LLM for agentic work hits preview, and you can see it firsthand with the team behind it. First look at the model, panel on what's still worth building, and a room full of founders and developers actually shipping with AI.

Workshop / hands-on · Demo night

Intel's robotics team walks through moving from prototype to production: real-time inference, power efficiency, sensor processing, and software portability. Hands-on demos and networking for founders actually building AI systems at the edge.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

IROS 2026 just wrapped in Pittsburgh, and SFC is bringing the best conversations back to San Francisco for an evening of talks and open discussion. Hear from people who were there about robots, research, and where physical AI is actually heading.

Demo night · Mixer / networking

Watch robotics, humanoids, and autonomous systems teams demo live prototypes in one room. If you're hunting talent, investment, or collaborators in frontier hardware, this is where the people building it actually gather.

Talks & panels

OtherMinds explores xenopsychology by interrogating which assumptions about alien minds we can actually defend, from physics to Darwinian logic to what "advanced" civilization really means. A thoughtful evening on projection, convergence, and what intelligence looks like beyond Earth.

Hackathon

One day to ship a multi-modal product that actually combines vision, voice, documents, and real-world data into something useful. Beta Fund, AWS, and OpenAI are backing this, and standout teams get fellowship interviews with real capital on the table.

Hackathon · Talks & panels

Build GTM workflows that actually save time: research accounts, prep meetings, and close loops without leaving your CRM. This beginner-friendly hackathon walks you through PromptQL's connected approach, then gives you the afternoon to prototype your own sales or marketing AI.

Talks & panels · Demo night

The open source AI community getting recognition it rarely gets. Keynotes from leaders like Irene Solaiman and Alex Newman, awards across infrastructure to education, then a social to meet the builders behind projects you actually use.

Mixer / networking

Atlas House is opening as a new residency hub for tech researchers and engineers in SF, backed by ElevenLabs' grant program offering a year of free AI audio access. If you're building at the frontier, this is worth a look for community and tools.

Mixer / networking

Hackathon · Demo night

175 builders spend one weekend at Y Combinator's office shipping real products with AI, no coding experience required. Winner gets a YC interview plus cash, and top 10 pitch to judges from YC and Emergent.

Hackathon

A hackathon launching right before GitHub Universe to fix what's broken about conferences, with free OpenAI credits and graph database tools at your disposal. Winning teams get iPhone Duos or cash equivalent, plus there's swag and prizes for everyone.

Hackathon

Build solutions for climate, mental health, justice reform, and design over a weekend with UN partners and four Bay Area nonprofits. Past winners landed at YC and the UN Climate Conference, and this year's projects come with sponsor credits and five thousand dollars in prizes.

Hackathon

Build a working app with any AI coding agent, then prove it works with Kane CLI on October 24th. Thirty grand in prizes await teams that ship something real and pass verification before the 6 PM deadline.

Hackathon

A hardware-focused hack weekend bringing scientists, software, and hardware engineers together to solve real lab automation problems with robotic arms, sample prep systems, and open builds. You'll form teams on the spot, work through custom challenges with partners like BioKEA, and demo working prototypes by Sunday.

Hackathon

Frontier models on real hardware, all day in SF: humanoids, arms, dexterous hands, no simulators. Approval-based teams of 1-4 building robot learning, teleop, and manipulation with mentors from the Bay Area robotics scene.

Hackathon

Talks & panels · Workshop / hands-on

A rare event for parents and kids to explore AI's impact together, with startup demos, research panels on child development, and philosophy workshops. NewKid bridges research and parenting through conversation, treating children as active participants in understanding their AI-shaped future.

Mixer / networking

A weekly accountability practice for builders balancing ambitious work with health and productivity goals. Tea, meditation, and peer check-ins at Frontier Tower's 16th floor teahouse.

Talks & panels

Executives at this closed-door roundtable will work through the real trade-offs of running AI on company infrastructure, with peer-to-peer comparison on protection, cost, and performance. Leave with a decision framework grounded in production deployment lessons from leaders already shipping private AI.

Workshop / hands-on · Talks & panels

LLMs give probabilistic answers, but questions about the physical world need exact results. This hands-on workshop shows you how to build geospatial AI agents that turn satellite data and weather into interactive risk dashboards using deterministic tools.

Workshop / hands-on · Mixer / networking

AI-native companies are shipping before defining category, then discovering GTM debt when speed meets fragility. This workshop from 3x CMOs breaks down the paradox and gives you a repeatable operating system with real agentic GTM examples.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Agents generate code faster than validation pipelines can handle it, tanking change success rates and token efficiency. Engineers shipping in production will share how they've rebuilt feedback loops and testing strategies for the agent era.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

A Halloween murder mystery where you'll debug a dead build alongside Flox engineers and AI Valley speakers, uncovering suspicious dependencies and environment issues. Costumes encouraged, production incidents not.

Talks & panels

Founder coach Matteo Cassese explores how chaos and internal work shape better founders, drawing from Marcus Aurelius to modern tech leaders. This is for people tired of grinding without reflection.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Three teams shipping AI in production discuss the unglamorous work: giving models context, testing reliability, handling code review and security. If you're building AI systems beyond chatbots, their insights on moving experiments into dependable products are worth your time.

Workshop / hands-on · Mixer / networking

Hands-on workshop diving into DROID robotics data with FiftyOne's multimodal viewer, hosted by Nebius and Voxel51 in Menlo Park. Bring a laptop and institutional email to actually work through real physical AI datasets alongside builders in the space.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Frontier model breakthroughs mean nothing if your system crashes under load or when GPUs fail. Infrastructure leaders and SREs break down practical architectures for resilient AI, covering GPU failures, inference fallbacks, redefining SLOs, and postmortems from real 2026 outages.

Workshop / hands-on · Mixer / networking

Party's multiplayer workspace lets your whole team and agents build together in one session, so you'll ship a real feature alongside strangers who become collaborators. No coding experience required, just bring your laptop and ideas to this Peninsula build night.

Talks & panels

The flagship gathering for immigrant founders reshaping US tech, with 1,000+ builders, speakers from OpenAI to Slack, and a Startup Grind competition across two days. If you're building something here regardless of where you're from, this is your people.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Enterprise IT leaders share how they're actually scaling agentic AI without blowing up their infrastructure budgets. VentureBeat curated the attendees and research to cut through vendor noise with real deployment patterns on inference, memory, and orchestration.

Workshop / hands-on · Demo night

Halfway through Open Call, ComfyUI's challenge to rebuild paywalled creative features, this build night brings together the scattered Discord community in person for hacking and demos. $10k grand prize, RTX 5090, and actual face-to-face time with model labs and platform builders backing the ecosystem.

Talks & panels

First Rays is betting on second-order effects: as AI moves into production, it's reshaping enterprise infrastructure in ways that'll spawn the next wave of important companies. Practitioner panels and portfolio founders discuss what's actually changing in security, data, and development environments.

Mixer / networking

A werewolf hunt disguised as networking at GitHub Universe's day one afterparty, where DevOps and infra engineers mingle over Mexican food while trying to catch the wolves seeded in conversation. No pitches, just drinks, sharp people, and the chance to win a prize by identifying who's been git blaming their way through the room.

Workshop / hands-on · Talks & panels

Hands-on workshop on building physical AI with FiftyOne, covering robotics datasets and vision model evaluation on real data. Lightning talks from local builders round out the evening of networking and technical work.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Data stacks optimized for humans now bottleneck agents pulling from multiple sources, demanding freshness, parallelization, and access controls the industry is still figuring out. Speakers from Velodb, StreamNative, PuppyGraph, and Datastrato break down what's actually breaking in production and how they're rebuilding the stack.

Mixer / networking

Small-batch dinner for robotics and physical AI founders, engineers, and investors at Studio 45. Three courses and two hours to make real connections with people actually building hardware in the Bay.

Mixer / networking

Early morning gathering for founders and builders shipping agents in production tools like Claude and Cursor. No pitches, just tacos and conversation with people deep in the same work, hosted at a SOMA spot opening early just for this crew.

Hackathon · Workshop / hands-on

Two days building end-to-end robotics applications with real robot arms, Viam infrastructure, and MongoDB to store your robot's sensor data. Teams of 2-3 ship projects like VLAs, vision-based manipulation, and quality inspection with a shot at taking home SO-101 kits and credits.

Talks & panels

Ten live demos from agentic AI founders tackling runtimes, orchestration, memory, and infrastructure. Small room of 80 builders, investors, and researchers with direct feedback from judges and a panel on what autonomous systems actually need.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Haitham Shahin from LangChain breaks down owning your intelligence and building agents, plus fresh takeaways from Interrupt NYC. The rest is networking with DMV builders over refreshments in Tyson's.

Workshop / hands-on

PromptQL walks through using multiplayer AI to move backlog items into specs, implementations, and team reviews in real time. Bring a laptop and actual work, spend an evening learning their workflow, then iterate on your own problem with their team nearby.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Recursive self-improvement is reshaping how teams build and iterate on AI systems, and Tim Shi from Recursive breaks it down in an intimate gallery setting. Expect candid conversation, art tours, and dinner with engineers working on the frontier.

Talks & panels

A panel on whether deployment expertise and operational data are robotics' real competitive advantage, with founders from Tesla's Optimus team and a16z portfolio companies. Worth attending if you're actually deploying robots or buying them at scale.

Mixer / networking

SF comedians riffing on AI startup life and Silicon Valley with drinks and researchers in Mountain View. Cathy Chao's opened for major comics and performed at the FBI headquarters, so this beats another networking happy hour.

Talks & panels

A panel with artists and builders exploring how inference-powered tools reshape creative work as instruments for expression. Practical perspective on building and using generative AI as a medium rather than just a utility.

Hackathon

Seven days to build something strange and find your first users, with 10k in prizes backing you up. One day in-person in SF on Halloween, then a week to ship online alongside builders from Melbourne and beyond.

Talks & panels · Research & papers

A focused reading group for researchers and builders working on world models and embodied AI, drawing people from Boston Dynamics, DeepMind, NVIDIA, Physical Intelligence, and Bay Area robotics startups. Expect keynotes, paper discussions, and technical roundtables on the frontier of robotic intelligence.

Talks & panels

Deep technical talks on open source analytics infrastructure meeting agentic AI, from engineers actually shipping production systems. No vendor theater, just architecture, performance, and real world patterns on data platforms, agents, and real time analytics.

Talks & panels · Workshop / hands-on

A four-day hybrid summit bringing 2,000 AI leaders, founders, and builders across enterprise, healthcare, education, and creative sectors with talks from Oracle, Google, Nvidia, and Stanford researchers. Hands-on workshops and live demos structured by domain, plus networking with practitioners actually shipping AI systems.

Demo night · Mixer / networking

F26 residents are shipping across ML research, robotics, physical AI, and hardware with some genuinely weird bets. This is the rare demo day where you'll see foundation models next to thermodynamics projects and actual robots.

Research & papers

SF CogSci's reading group is tackling a fresh 2026 paper on computation and cooperation, exactly the kind of work worth discussing with people thinking about minds and systems. Read the paper, show up November 3rd at Frontier Tower, and talk it through.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Stanford researchers present Intelligence per Watt, a metric for measuring how efficiently AI models deliver capabilities against power consumed. Learn which queries belong on local hardware versus cloud infrastructure as energy constraints reshape where AI actually runs.

Demo night

Talks & panels · Workshop / hands-on

Two days of content infrastructure talks headlined by Levie, Huang, and Tan, with Thursday keynotes and technical sessions followed by Friday workshops on building with Box and AI. Worth attending if you're exploring how content platforms fit into your AI stack.

Talks & panels

Voice agents look polished in demos but break fast in production, where latency stalls conversations, missed interruptions feel rude, and edge cases wreck reliability. This one-day forum brings teams actually operating voice systems to surface what fails after launch and how architecture decisions compound the pain.

Demo night

Korean AI startups pitching from Frontier Tower, SF's new vertical village for frontier tech and creative builders. Worth scoping if you want to see what's brewing in the Korean AI scene and the cross-disciplinary energy of the tower itself.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

A vetted night for AI founders who've actually raised or built serious ARR, paired with VCs worth knowing. Panel on what's getting funded in 2027, then real conversations over drinks and dinner.

Talks & panels

Agents change how you evaluate everything: they generate data, run queries, and take actions in production. Ankur from Braintrust and Corinne from Greylock discuss moving from standalone evals to real agent observability.

Talks & panels

Two talks on decision models as a faster, cheaper alternative to routing every judgment call to a frontier LLM. Sydney Runkle covers pairing them with LangGraph, and Seán Roche benchmarks Jev against GPT and Claude for agent evaluation.

Talks & panels · Demo night

The 139th SF Hardware Meetup dives into manufacturing and design with guest talks and open mic demos from the community. Bring a prototype or work-in-progress if you want to pitch, then stick around to network with hardware builders.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

A focused reading group where robotics researchers and builders from DeepMind, Boston Dynamics, Physical Intelligence, and Bay Area startups dig into world models and embodied AI. Expect a keynote, open roundtable on spotlight papers, and the kind of technical depth you only get in a room of people actually shipping robots.

Talks & panels

A one-day technical conference on the infrastructure layer beneath AI products: metering, billing, credits, pricing, cost control. If you're building systems where tokens are just the start, this is where the real problems live.

Talks & panels · Demo night

Apify's bringing together the builders actually shipping production AI agents and automation to show real demos and patterns that work. Full day of talks, live builds, and direct access to the team at The Pearl on November 10.

Talks & panels · Workshop / hands-on

For infrastructure leaders shipping AI at scale, this covers where inference actually runs, how to secure agents, and why milliseconds matter for your bottom line. The live multimodal teardown and hands-on stress-testing sessions ground the vision in real implementation choices.

Demo night

The Residency's F26 cohort is demoing work across ML research, physical AI, robotics, and foundation models after building in 14 homes globally. This is where investors find founders with the conviction and chops to actually ship at scale.

Mixer / networking

Women builders discussing agent identity over chef's menu at Flour + Water's test kitchen. Limited spots, so this one fills fast if the combo of technical depth and good food appeals to you.