Sunday, May 24, 2026
I stopped noticing Waymos sooner than expected. I passed four robotaxis in a single block last week and only clocked the fourth. A year ago every sighting felt like the future. Now it's traffic.
That pattern (spectacle to infrastructure to background) is the template physical AI is following everywhere it touches. Warehouse robots became background years ago. Aurora has logged 250,000 incident-free miles of autonomous trucking between Fort Worth and El Paso. Amazon crossed one million robots across its fulfillment network. The thing we keep calling new is already running underneath the economy we live in.
Jensen Huang has been hammering this frame since CES: 85% of global GDP lives in the physical economy, and AI has barely touched it. The capital agrees. Manufacturing robotics funding hit $25.7B in 2025, up 165% from the year before. Physical Intelligence raised $1.1B. World Labs raised $1.23B. Yann LeCun left Meta to raise the largest seed round in European history.
Tomorrow night at AI Research Circle, Atharva Atre from Niantic Spatial walks us through the five technical layers pulling AI into the physical world. Conversational seminar, one anchor paper per layer, room to riff.
Doors at 6:45, 550 Laguna. I'll be there asking Atharva to explain V-JEPA like I'm five years old.
- Lee
Coming up at Rally
AI Research Circle: Physical AI
2026-05-25 · 7:00 PM - 8:45 PM
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.
Claude Code Demos: Building the State of the Art
2026-05-26 · 6:45 PM - 8:45 PM
Bi-weekly community event for builders working with agentic coding tools, with techniques going back to a shared repo at github.com/bsota/collective.
Builders Night
2026-06-01 · 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM
Monday co-working for AI builders. Two hours of focused build time with a share-back round to close.
Around SF this week
Tuesday, May 26, 5:30 PM - 8:30 PM
The gap between agent demos and production systems comes down to evaluation, orchestration, and feedback loops. This closed-door panel with researchers from Google DeepMind, Snowflake, and Google Research digs into what actually breaks agents at scale.
Tuesday, May 26, 6 PM - 8:30 PM
Your friend pitches you to the room while recruiters from Workato, Nooks.ai, Salient, and others listen in. It's a refreshingly honest alternative to traditional tech hiring, with live Q&A and networking after the pitches wrap.
Tuesday, May 26, 6 PM - 9 PM
Platform engineers and SREs exploring how observability feeds directly into ops automation with AI agents. Unconference format means you shape the discussion around what actually matters in your production environment.
Tuesday, May 26, 7 PM - 9:30 PM
For people who care more about building models than using them: monthly talks on training, optimization, and architecture decisions that disappear between papers and production. Curated crowd, three speakers each month, then open floor to dig deeper.
Wednesday, May 27, 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Firebase and Public are shipping agents into production systems: full-stack agentic apps with real market data and order execution. Postman walks through using Collections as runtime guardrails so agents can safely handle real money.
Saturday, May 30, 9 AM - 6 PM
Despite a decade of sensors and wearables, the gap between an older adult's emergency at home and someone realizing help is needed remains unsolved. This hackathon brings designers, engineers, and clinicians together to prototype practical solutions for safer aging in place.
Wednesday, Jun 3, 8 AM - 9 AM
Casual weekly breakfast for people actually shipping production agents, not the hype phase anymore. You'll find the conversations that happen three months before you hit a problem, with builders ahead of where you are.