Sunday, August 9, 2026
August at Rally belongs to physical AI. On the 25th we're at Niantic Spatial's space in the Ferry Building, for Physical AI: What's Working (and What Still Breaks), and Degrees of Freedom, our twice-monthly bring-your-own-robot build night at Mission Robotics, starts August 31. Planning these has meant a summer of conversations with robotics builders, and the question I keep coming back to is whose life it improves, and how.
We talk at length about capabilities: longer horizons, surer grasping, cheaper data, which is fair, capabilities are the work. But the human benefits, dangerous jobs nobody has to do, care for aging parents that doesn't run out, hours handed back to your week, those only arrive on purpose when somebody names them while the work is still early. So I'm asking the panel on the 25th, the builders I meet, and you, as a thought starter for the month: when physical AI works, what does an ordinary day get back and what do we gain collectively?
Builders Night is tomorrow at 6:45 at The Commons, bring a project. See you there.
Lee
Coming up at Rally
Builders Night
2026-08-10 · 6:45 PM - 9:00 PM
Heads-down work for two hours, then the round where everyone says what shipped and what they're stuck on.
Physical AI: What's Working (and What Still Breaks)
2026-08-25 · 5:30 PM - 8:00 PM
Live demos across perception, mapping, simulation, and hardware, then the demoers sit down together for a panel.
Degrees of Freedom: Bring Your Own Robot
2026-08-31 · 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Robotics builder night. Bring the robot; the bench, the tools, and resident roboticists are there.
Around SF this week
Monday, Aug 10, 5:30 PM - 9:00 PM
Spatial intelligence is where the digital and physical sides of this field finally meet, and World Labs builds the frontier models doing it. Fireside chat at 6:40, then live demos.
Tuesday, Aug 11, 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM
You direct the agents and they write the code, with Anthropic engineers at your shoulder while you do it. Build stations, laptops required, and you leave with something you actually shipped.
Wednesday, Aug 12, 1:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Name the two or three places your startup is bottlenecked, then spend the afternoon unblocking them with Anthropic's applied AI team, production credits included. Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code, opens.
Wednesday, Aug 12, 5:00 PM
Agent demos at music-venue scale: sixteen hundred people registered to watch the teams building agentic AI show what's actually working. WorkOS and Michael Grinich host at the Regency.
Wednesday, Aug 12, 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
AI-coding best practices change weekly and the real ones live inside companies, so everyone brings a five-minute demo of an internal setup that works. No pitching allowed; HumanLayer and Heavybit host.
Wednesday, Aug 12, 6:00 PM - 8:30 PM
The same model can cost 3x more and respond up to 12x slower depending on who serves it. The team benchmarking 500+ inference endpoints walks through the numbers and how to choose.
Thursday, Aug 13, 12:30 PM - 8:00 PM
Four hours to build an agent that actually remembers, retrieves, and acts on real application data, judged live. $15,000 and a year of Cursor Ultra for the winners; teams of four, apply to hack.
Thursday, Aug 13, 5:30 PM - 8:00 PM
Prototypes are easy now; systems a large organization can actually run are still the hard part. Timbal builds an enterprise workflow live, then a Cathay Innovation panel on cracking the US market from Europe.
Thursday, Aug 13, 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM
A hundred days of free fellowship, demoed: an open-source AI co-scientist, RL-generated gene-therapy hypotheses, a DIY self-driving lab. Demos at 7, then an open mic if you're building science tools yourself.