Sunday, August 30, 2026
At last week's physical AI night, Niantic Spatial's Punit Vats was candid about a belief he's updated: he had long assumed scaling laws would eventually solve generalization, and he now thinks he was wrong. It's a shift much of the field is making, and all three companies on stage described the same working answer: deploy, watch where it fails, learn from what comes back. RLWRLD calls itself a deployment-first lab for exactly that reason, and Coco's Rob Zehner put it plainest: run your model in the actual business condition where you need it. That failure loop is the premise The Reality Gap opens with this Tuesday at Mission Robotics, to a full room. The recording of the panel is in the works for the Rally YouTube channel, and I'll link it here the moment it's up.
Tomorrow is a double night: Builders Night at 6:30 at The Commons, bring a project, and Degrees of Freedom, session one of our robot build night, opens at 6:00 at Mission Robotics. See you there.
Lee
Coming up at Rally
Degrees of Freedom: Bring Your Own Robot @ Mission Robotics
2026-08-31 · 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Session one of the twice-monthly night for hardware builders. A shop floor of benches at Mission Robotics, and people who can tell you why the arm keeps drifting.
Builders Night
2026-08-31 · 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM
The Monday working session at The Commons, open to whatever you're building. Bring the project, claim a table, and ask the room when you hit a wall.
The Reality Gap: A Sim-to-Real Seminar
2026-09-01 · 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Session one runs Tuesday, the start of monthly sessions on why robots that pass in simulation still fail on hardware. I'll bring what the room learns back here as the season runs. Presented with Protege.
Around SF this week
Tuesday, Sep 1, 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Having access to image and video models is one thing; a working creative process around them is the harder part. Luma's senior creative team runs session two, on characters and performance.
Wednesday, Sep 2, 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Software now has to serve two kinds of user, humans and agents, and that reshapes product, permissions, and pricing. A fireside with Vercel's Guillermo Rauch and Plain's Simon Rohrbach.
Wednesday, Sep 2, 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM
An evening with the Abstract crowd once the conference day ends. Food, drinks, and the speakers and Convex team at SFJAZZ.
Wednesday, Sep 2, 9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Breakfast first, then a panel on getting AI products from code to scale. Engineers from Meta, LinkedIn, and You.com are on the panel, with Founders Bay hosting.
Thursday, Sep 3, 5:00 PM - 9:00 PM
A low-pressure evening for women to get hands-on with Grok Bot: coworking at a16z with a short demo block. Come for an hour or stay the whole night.
Thursday, Sep 3, 5:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Research conversations fragment once the conference ends; this launch is built to keep the voice-AI one going. NVIDIA's Rajarshi Roy and Smallest AI's Akshat Mandloi speak, and the Q&A is the main event.
Friday, Sep 4, 1:00 PM - 5:30 PM
One afternoon to turn an idea into a working product, with no coding background required. A guided walkthrough, then build time on Lovable and ElevenLabs, with a showcase to close.
Saturday, Sep 5, 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Robot learning is usually treated as software layered on fixed hardware, and this session argues the body shapes what a robot can learn. Applied Intuition's Chenyang Ma keynotes, then an open roundtable.