Rally events, and the rest of AI SF

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

The Disrupt Stage features OpenAI, Anthropic, and Nvidia leaders across six programming tracks focused on sustainable AI companies. The real draw is 250+ speakers plus the Startup Battlefield competition and hallway connections you'd spend a year building otherwise.

DYNA's founders share how they're scaling robot foundation models from laundromats to restaurants, with Jason Ma walking through the research behind their world-action model and what actually ships in production. Solid technical deep-dive if you're thinking about embodied AI or how scaling laws translate from vision to robotics.

Mixer / networking

Engineering leaders swapping war stories over drinks with folks who actually understand why migrations take forever. No sales pitches, just a room full of people who've lived the chaos.

Mixer / networking

Post-ELC decompression at Ghirardelli Square with engineering leaders and founders, no slides required. Craft cocktails and Bay views while comparing notes on scaling teams and the AI inflection point with people who actually get it.

Mixer / networking

LlamaIndex is launching Doc Chai, an iced toasted brown sugar chai blending traditional South Asian spices with a modern twist, at Corgi Cafe with free drinks for the first 100, live DJ, and community builders. A casual celebration worth stopping by if you're in the scene.

Talks & panels

Agentic AI is breaking legacy databases built for single users, not thousands of parallel agent instances needing vectors, transactions, and analytics simultaneously. TiDB SCaiLE 2026 gathers engineers solving data infrastructure at scale with speakers from Atlassian, Affirm, Pinterest, and Databricks.

Talks & panels

Most production AI needs to layer agents onto existing workflows without blowing up what's already running. Orkes Shift brings engineers solving that exact problem to share patterns for durability, observability, and human oversight at scale.

Mixer / networking

Founders selling to enterprise and operators buying AI actually talk openly over pickleball and dinner, not across a demo call. Twelve vetted people on Treasure Island discussing what makes deals happen and what kills them.

Mixer / networking

Rooftop happy hour during Disrupt bringing together pre-seed-plus founders, investors, and tech media for actual deal conversations. Curated guest list means you're networking with people who matter, not random attendees.

Mixer / networking

Private wrap-up for Ship attendees at Motoring Coffee with Vercel's exec team. Skip the formal keynotes and get straight to talking with the people actually building the platform.

Talks & panels

Tony Zhao built foundational imitation learning research at DeepMind and Tesla before starting Sunday Robotics to ship general-purpose home robots. Hear directly from him on what robotics needs to actually work in people's homes.

Mixer / networking

Healthleap's engineering and data science teams are hosting a casual ping-pong night at SPIN with free drinks. Good chance to meet people actually shipping AI for hospital risk screening if you're exploring what's next.

Mixer / networking

Eleven top researchers and founders debating the hardest problems in AI over four courses in Mountain View. This VIP dinner targets decision-makers who own model training data, evals, or the companies building them.

Mixer / networking

Hackathon

A hackathon centered on what humans bring to AI building: taste, creativity, and judgment about what's worth making. Judges from Google Labs, DeepMind, and Amazon will pick winners for incubation opportunities and founder meetings.

Demo night

Watch teams that spent the weekend mining multimodal patient datasets surface biological insights, novel algorithms, and new ways to wrangle messy human data. The demos run science fair style at 5PM with finalist presentations and prizes at 6:30PM.

Hackathon · Mixer / networking

A full-day hackathon across six tracks where developers, founders, designers, and business leaders build multi-agent AI solutions tackling everything from climate to commerce. Meet co-founders, mentors, and investors while shipping something real alongside the broader AI ecosystem.

Hackathon

Build a company run entirely by AI agents working as your founding team. This hackathon challenges you to create an AI-native business across climate, health, education, commerce, or media tracks, showing how specialized agents can actually execute and grow a real venture.

Talks & panels

Three live debates on the core tensions in open source AI: frontier model releases, investment returns, and capability gaps through 2030. Sharp takes from people who actually disagree, hosted at GitHub HQ where you can push back in real time.

Demo night · Mixer / networking

New community series bringing together Filipino engineers and founders building AI across the Bay Area. Demo night format means you'll see actual tools and workflows while meeting people shipping real projects.

Talks & panels

Two days of senior leaders from robotics, autonomous systems, and frontier AI orgs converge on embodied AI and autonomy. Application-only access keeps the room tight and the signal high.

Talks & panels

Two confirmed talks worth your time: forkable sandboxes for long-running agents from Daytona, and infrastructure patterns for scaling AI apps from Oracle engineers. The rest is TBA, but the first half alone justifies showing up.

Hackathon

Three days where judges watch you build under real constraint, not rehearse a pitch. Teams that survive the pressure test and Street Test follow-up get noticed by actual investors.

Talks & panels

Trae Stephens built Anduril into a defense AI powerhouse and spent years at Palantir scaling systems for intelligence agencies. This fireside chat covers the trajectory from early government work to founding in autonomous systems, straight from someone who's done both.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Milvus 3.0 lets you search vectors, full-text, and structured data directly on lake-resident formats like Parquet and Lance without maintaining a separate serving copy. Hear from maintainers and production engineers on the architecture, tradeoffs, and when this approach actually makes sense at scale.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Three hard problems for long-running agents: surviving crashes, staying effective against external systems, and maintaining visibility into what happened. This edition covers durable execution and agent infrastructure with teams already shipping these solutions to production.

Demo night

Likely is handing out the first personal AI agents that understand your relationships and can coordinate directly with agents of people you know. Claim one of the remaining genesis agents and become part of the network that forms the foundation of agent-to-agent communication.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Four technical talks on running agents and AI systems at scale, from observability and debugging to deploying across customer environments. Real infrastructure problems from teams actually operating production AI.

Mixer / networking

A private dinner for engineering leaders shipping AI agents at scale, focused on what actually breaks moving from demo to production. Twelve people around a table comparing notes on the same hard problems from different angles, no panels or pitches.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

The Fearn team walks through patent strategy for hardware founders in the early filing stage, with concrete advice from former Big Law experts now focused on startups. Direct Q&A beats generic IP advice if you're shipping hardware in the next few months.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mixer / networking

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.