Sunday, August 16, 2026
On August 25 we're putting three companies building physical AI on one stage, and each of them owns a different piece of the problem. Niantic Spatial captures a room as a Gaussian splat accurate enough to train a robot inside it, Coco Robotics runs a sidewalk delivery fleet at walking speed, and RLWRLD builds foundation models for the contact-rich work robots still fail at. Each opens with what they built and then says where it breaks. The robots are out on the floor from 5:30, before the program and again after. It's at The Forest inside the Ferry Building, and attendance is subject to approval.
If there's a question you want put to that panel, reply and tell me. I'm collecting them.
Builders Night is tomorrow at 6:30 at The Commons, bring a project. See you there.
Lee
Coming up at Rally
Builders Night
2026-08-17 · 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM
Weekly deep work session where builders show up with a project and leave with more momentum. Quiet focused time, occasional breakthroughs, and a share-back circle where people ask for what they need.
Physical AI: What's Working (and What Still Breaks)
2026-08-25 · 5:30 PM - 8:00 PM
Niantic Spatial, Coco Robotics, and RLWRLD each bring one piece and a robot, talk for ten minutes about what they built and where it still fails, then sit down together for a panel on the parts nobody has solved.
Degrees of Freedom: Bring Your Own Robot @ Mission Robotics
2026-08-31 · 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
You built the arm at the kitchen table and trained the policy overnight on your gaming rig, and the one thing none of it came with is labmates. A twice-monthly working night for people building physical AI without a lab around them. No robot required.
The Reality Gap: A Sim-to-Real Seminar
2026-09-01 · 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
A robot can learn to walk in simulation and hold up on real ground, and then you teach it to grip something and it falls apart on contact. Our new monthly seminar holds that one problem from September through January: a short talk from someone who has fought it on real hardware, then the room digs in over dinner. The core group forms at session one, and registration is by approval.
Around SF this week
Monday, Aug 17, 4:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Chinchilla told you how to size a model, and then inference compute started eating the budget. Nicholas Roberts presents his COLM 2026 paper on optimizing model size, training tokens, and inference samples jointly.
Monday, Aug 17, 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Reading about teleoperated data collection is a different thing from running an arm yourself. Trossen's engineers hand you the controls on a WidowX through Glide, and you can come for twenty minutes or stay all three hours.
Tuesday, Aug 18, 5:00 PM - 8:00 PM
PromptQL runs a monthly night where the room shares what it has been building over whatever pastry the city is currently lining up for. This month that's warm shio pan from Tano SF.
Wednesday, Aug 19, 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
AI for science is bottlenecked on experiments, since the loop only closes as fast as a lab produces clean data. South Park Commons and Tetherline convene people working that gap, from robotic workcells to AI co-scientists.
Wednesday, Aug 19, 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Most panels about AI and creativity stop at the argument, and this one screens the work. A private, waitlist-only showing of Whispers from three-time Emmy winner Bernie Su, then a panel on where AI lands in media and entertainment.
Thursday, Aug 20, 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
If agents do most of the browsing, search has to get orders of magnitude cheaper than Google. Parag Agrawal, who ran Twitter and now runs Parallel, in conversation with Baseten's Charles O'Neill.
Thursday, Aug 20, 6:00 PM - 8:30 PM
Open models like Kimi and GLM are closing on Claude Code and Codex at a fraction of the cost. Jeffrey Morgan of Ollama, OpenHands, and FriendliAI on whether a production coding agent still needs a closed model.
Thursday, Aug 20, 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Thursday is the startup half of Trossen's residency, hosted with Intel. The arms are running, their engineering and solutions team is on the floor all night, and the rest of the room is other early-stage robotics teams.
Thursday, Aug 20, 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Fine-tuning stays abstract until you see your own before and after, so you build a small instruction dataset and tune an open-weight model on a real Nebius GPU. Bring a laptop and leave with the model.
Saturday, Aug 22, 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Human video gives robots endless examples of contact and no sense of force at all. Kelin Yu of Maryland keynotes a reading club on closing that gap, hosted by Junfan Zhu and Aurora Feng.