Sunday, May 31, 2026
The line from our last AI Research Circle I keep coming back to: we are two to three years out from robots operating reliably in uncontrolled environments, and the first wave will be non-humanoid robots in controlled environments like warehouses, logistics, and autonomous trucking.
Atharva Atre, AI researcher at Niantic Spatial, walked the room through where physical AI actually works today, the five properties a world model has to hold, why physical accuracy is the one that keeps breaking. Atharva's read is that robotics will stay closed and vertically integrated (more Apple than open ecosystem) because every outside dependency is a place for a robot to fail.
A recording of the session is now available on the Rally YouTube channel. Please like and a subscribe to help the channel grow.
See you tomorrow at Builders Night and Wednesday at Keep in Touch Networking Night (RSVP below).
- Lee
Coming up at Rally
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.
Keep in Touch: Builders Networking Night
2026-06-03 · 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
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.
Claude Code Demos: Building the State of the Art
2026-06-09 · 6:45 PM - 8:45 PM
Most builders using Claude Code, Cursor, or custom agents are figuring out their workflows solo. This meetup puts you in a room with others doing the same work: live walkthroughs of real setups, then the night comparing notes.
Around SF this week
Monday, Jun 1, 5:30 PM - 9:30 PM
ic and Sentry on running MCP in production, with Bitmovin on what they built and broke. Talks, then networking.
Wednesday, Jun 3, 3 PM - 5:30 PM
Stanford's Yijia Shao walks through her ICLR paper on human-agent collaboration, hosted by Snorkel AI. A small room and the actual author
Wednesday, Jun 3, 6:30 PM - 8 PM
A panel on how production agents actually reach enterprise data, with people from Fivetran, LiveRamp, and Lakesail. The data-plumbing side of agents.
Thursday, Jun 4, 4:45 PM - 8:30 PM
FailSafe, NEAR AI, and AWS on getting agents to hold up in production, with live demos. For the part after the demo works.
Thursday, Jun 4, 9 AM - 4 PM
The free, developer side of Snowflake Summit, with hands-on bootcamps and talks from OpenAI, Vercel, and Cursor. The conference you can walk into without a paid badge.
Friday, Jun 5, 5 PM - 8 PM
David Sussillo, ex-Google Brain and Meta Reality Labs, on brain-machine interfaces and a talk called "Emergence and the Making of a Person." The deepest end of the week.
Saturday, Jun 6, 9 AM - 5 PM
A weekend hackathon on multi-agent orchestration at Weights & Biases. Over $15k in prizes, including a robot dog.