Monday, October 12, 2026
Today's Open Intelligence Summit Workshop Day at The Midway is a full day of shipping with open-weight models, where you choose between standing up a Nous Research Hermes agent on DigitalOcean, routing across open models to balance cost, latency and quality, or fine-tuning and serving a model of your own. MLH mentors work at your table through the build session, and lunch is on the rooftop. The main summit follows tomorrow, and Open Source AI Week opens Friday at 6:00 with Open Together, a free builder meetup at The Midway with community demos and a dance party from 9:00 to midnight.
On October 20 I'll be at Encord's Long Horizon summit for the robotics day at Fort Mason. Code RALLYSF25 brings a day-one ticket from $399 to $299, and Rally earns a share of tickets sold with it.
Builders Night runs tonight at 6:30 at 550 Laguna Street, so bring a project. See you there.
Lee
Coming up at Rally
Builders Night
2026-10-12 · 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM
Builders Night is a weekly room where people bring a project, work side by side in a quiet deep-work sprint, and close with a share-back to ask for help and offer what they know. First-timers are welcome.
Around SF this week
Monday, Oct 12, 9:00 AM - 2:00 PM
Stand up a Nous Research Hermes agent on DigitalOcean, route across open models to balance cost, latency and quality, or fine-tune or serve an open-weight model. MLH mentors and technical experts work with you at your table.
Tuesday, Oct 13, 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
A relaxed evening of conversation and cocktails among AI leaders and builders, with no pitches or panels. Braintrust, Modal, Kernel and TypeSafe host it at Local Edition, with good food and drinks.
Tuesday, Oct 13, 9:30 AM - 7:00 PM
Eight teams demo agentic AI projects they built on AWS, live on stage, and the day around them covers Bedrock, SageMaker and the Strands Agents SDK. Sessions at the AWS Builder Loft cover building autonomous agents responsibly.
Wednesday, Oct 14, 10:00 AM - 6:00 PM
Build agents that keep producing useful work after you step away, or take the multimodal or VR track, at a one-day Vercel and Meta hackathon. Nine finalists demo live for three minutes each.
Wednesday, Oct 14, 5:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Presentations stay brief so most of the evening goes to questions and critique, with materials shared in advance. It meets over dinner at Mission Robotics, among humanoids and robot arms, for people training policies on hardware.
Friday, Oct 16, 6:00 PM - 12:00 AM
Open Source AI Week opens with a free party for builders working with open models, with community demos until 9:00 and a DJ dance party until midnight. Arcee AI and Reflection AI sponsor the night.
Saturday, Oct 17, 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Reading Club 34 asks how robots improve without retraining, with UC Berkeley's Yen-Jen Wang presenting RPG. ETHIS's Xiaoran Cai adds a lightning talk on trustworthy physical AI, and the three-hour afternoon includes a keynote.
Sunday, Oct 18, 1:00 PM - 7:00 PM
This afternoon asks what happens to a demo once real users, real costs and real workflows enter the picture. Leaders from Gen, Cresta and fal take the main stage, with a breakout area for hands-on projects.