Monday, September 14, 2026
The recording of our physical AI night at Niantic Spatial is up on the Rally YouTube channel, and the part worth your time is where each company got specific about what still breaks. Rob Zehner of Coco said the thing that eats his day is everything around the robot: order data moving back and forth with partners, and sidewalks that have nothing like the maps cars get. Niantic Spatial showed why a depth-trained policy can't see glass and an RGB policy trained inside one of their reconstructions can, and the Flexion robot trained that way ran its zero-shot deployment at a 97.8 percent success rate. The full recording is up now.
Tonight there is no Builders Night at The Commons; Degrees of Freedom, our robotics builders night, opens at 6:00 at Mission Robotics, and that is where I'll be. See you there.
Lee
Coming up at Rally
Degrees of Freedom: Bring Your Own Robot @ Mission Robotics
2026-09-14 · 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Session two of our robotics builders night: two hours at the bench beside other people building hardware.
Around SF this week
Tuesday, Sep 15, 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM
Qasar Younis went from automotive engineer at GM and Bosch to COO of Y Combinator to CEO of Applied Intuition, a rare path through hardware and software. A midday fireside at South Park Commons, conversation at noon.
Tuesday, Sep 15, 5:30 PM - 8:30 PM
ReactVision is making the case for moving from screens to spaces, and this night tests it with live agentic XR demos for people building AI agents. Oliver Edis and Matt Hargett, ex-Roblox, talk, then demos at 7:30.
Tuesday, Sep 15, 5:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Three-minute lightning demos of the agent setups people actually run, at Sentry HQ: which harness, which framework, whether it lives on a laptop or a remote box. Show up with yours, or come to borrow ideas.
Tuesday, Sep 15, 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Voice agents only work when they survive real-world noise, and that same perception problem shows up wherever AI meets the physical world. The Audio Layer's third edition, at Tavus, widens its voice AI lens to robotics.
Wednesday, Sep 16, 5:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Talks stay short on purpose so most of the evening goes to assumptions, evaluation methods, and failure modes behind the papers. Founders edition over dinner at AGI House, with frontier-lab, Stanford, and Berkeley researchers in the room.
Thursday, Sep 17, 5:30 PM - 8:00 PM
An MCP App sends a real interface back from the server, the user clicks around in it, and what they did lands in the agent's context. CopilotKit hosts, with Anthropic's Tobin South as guest and demos at 6.
Thursday, Sep 17, 6:00 PM - 8:30 PM
Voice agents that answer in real time and predictions off business tables are two places a small specialized model beats a frontier generalist. Baseten hosts Gradium, Synthefy, and Sid.ai on running several at once.
Thursday, Sep 17, 8:00 AM - 9:30 AM
People building agents inside tools like Claude Code and Cursor compare notes over breakfast tacos, with impromptu demos and no pitches. Bring a skill you've built for others to use; Michael Ducker, ex-Mercury and Twitter, hosts.
Friday, Sep 18, 9:30 AM - 7:30 PM
The brief is an AI startup between the 10 a.m. demos and the 4:30 judging, with voice AI and general tracks. Winners at 6:30; AWS, Gravitational Ventures, and Nebius are among the partners.
Saturday, Sep 19, 9:00 AM - 9:00 PM
One day to take a real problem to a working AI product and a startup pitch, judged on what got built that day and its potential as a company. Frontier Tower hosts, and LIKELION US runs it.