Monday, October 5, 2026
It's SF Tech Week, which this year means about 1,500 events between today and Sunday, split across Luma and Partiful. You can find them at rallysf.com/events, sorted by day and time. The picks below are the ones I'd choose if you build agents or robots.
I'll be at Encord's Long Horizon summit on October 20, the robotics day at Fort Mason. It opens with Deepak Pathak of Skild AI, Alex Kendall of Wayve and Quan Vuong of Physical Intelligence, three companies building general-purpose models for robots and cars. Code RALLYSF25 brings a day-one ticket from $399 to $299, and if your company pays for conferences, the site has a ready-made email for getting it approved. Rally earns a share of tickets sold with the code.
See you there.
Lee
Coming up at Rally
Builders Night
2026-10-12 · 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM
A weekly coworking session where builders show up with a project and leave with real momentum. Quiet deep work sprints paired with a share-back where you learn from others and get unstuck together.
Around SF this week
Monday, Oct 5, 5:00 PM - 8:30 PM
An agent that is right in the demo can answer confidently wrong once a fact changes underneath it. SurrealDB's Tobie Morgan Hitchcock and Mastra's Aamish Ahmad Beg cover where agent knowledge lives and who keeps it true.
Tuesday, Oct 6, 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Robotics data moves from collection and training to deployment and commercial value, and this panel follows that path. Speakers come from AgiBot, Astera Robotics and Veesion, with networking before and after the panel.
Tuesday, Oct 6, 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Three infrastructure leaders get twelve minutes each to tell one true story of an AI or agent system going wrong. Matt Lenhard of Vectoral covers inference theft and token fraud, and NVIDIA's resilience engineer speaks from incident command.
Wednesday, Oct 7, 5:00 PM - 8:30 PM
Ollama and Trajectory made different bets on closed models, open models and proprietary training, and each explains what they run today. Crusoe's Erwan Menard joins them on the cost, control and speed tradeoffs behind each choice.
Wednesday, Oct 7, 5:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Agent memory has to stay valid as facts change and permissions shift, which makes it a data systems question. Zep's Daniel Chalef and UC Berkeley researchers Shu Liu and Shubham Agarwal present, with papers shared in advance.
Thursday, Oct 8, 5:00 PM - 7:30 PM
Once an agent can reach Salesforce, Slack and internal APIs, someone has to decide its identity and what it may do. Agentic Fabriq and Open Future Forum host a technical discussion on least-privilege access, credentials and auditing.
Friday, Oct 9, 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM
Engineers debate spicy topics like banning open weights in one-on-one matchups, and the audience votes live on each winner. This night with Qdrant and Neo4j is built for engineers, AI researchers and builders, with prizes for winners.
Saturday, Oct 10, 10:00 AM - 8:00 PM
Teams build a startup in one day, from validating a problem to a working MVP and a judged pitch. AI teammates are built with Kylon, and judges score AI-native execution along with their creativity and effectiveness.
Saturday, Oct 10, 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM
JEPA world models plan by predicting action consequences in a learned representation space, and NYU's Ying Wang presents AdaJEPA. Hongyu Li, a robotics researcher at NVIDIA, speaks on perceiving, predicting and planning for physical interaction.