Funding the Commons SF: Intelligence at the Frontier
Building the systems humanity needs in the age of AI
A two-day vertical festival across 16 floors of the Frontier Tower to prototype the funding, governance, and coordination systems humanity needs before superintelligence arrives.
For centuries, intelligence was biological, shaped by lived experience and embodied knowing, wielded with intention and agency.
Now we're building systems that extract human patterns as data and process at massive scales. The question is how we design them.
Two paths forward:
The Path of Extraction: If we treat AI like oil (enclosure, short-term profit, proprietary control) we risk an "Intelligence Curse": a future where surplus is captured by the few and human agency is hollowed out.
The Path of Stewardship: If we treat AI like a garden (cultivation, coordination, alignment) we can build a regenerative future that combines efficiency with human flourishing.
As it stands, our coordination systems are lagging behind our technical capabilities. The test of our generation isn't whether we can build superintelligence. It's whether we can build the human institutions capable of stewarding it.
The Experience: A Vertical Village
A vertical village where builders, funders, academics, AI researchers, policymakers, and artists stop talking at each other and start designing with each other.
Nine floors will host programming - each its own world:
🚀 Spaceship (Floor 2): The main stage. AI-assisted funding, public AI infrastructure, and the coordination systems humanity needs to ensure intelligence serves everyone.
🤖 Robotics & Hard Tech (Floor 4): 36-hour overnight hackathon with Protocol Labs. Open-source robotics, physical AI, and the question of who funds hardware for human flourishing.
🎨 Arts & Music (Floor 6): Creativity can't be automated. Curated gallery, talks on technology and the arts, live music performances into the evening.
🔧 Maker Space (Floor 7): 4,000 sq ft prototyping lab with laser cutters, 3D printers, and CNCs. Turn ideas into prototypes in minutes.
🧠 Neuro & Biotech (Floor 8): Tools to heal people and the planet. Community biolab with hands-on workshops: test your own genetics, test your local water supply, hear how founders cured their own diseases.
⚡ AI & Autonomous Systems (Floor 9): Can we build intelligence that amplifies human agency instead of replacing it? Hands-on workshops, motion capture demos, GPU compute, and salons exploring post-labor economics.
🧬 Health & Longevity (Floor 11): Live long enough to see the far future. Biotech demos, longevity research talks, and the community building Viva City.
💎 Ethereum House (Floor 12): Live funding experiments in action. Quadratic funding rounds, open agent economy demos (ERC-8004), and working sessions where researchers and builders leave with grants.
🌱 Flourishing (Floor 14): Earth Commons on March 15: exploring climate finance, bioregionalism, and whether AI can serve life instead of just optimizing it. Speakers and unconference sessions.
The Meta-Experiment: Every floor gets a budget to allocate autonomously. Each floor presents its governance and funding mechanisms during the event - creating a live dataset on human coordination in the AI age. 20% of profits seed a Frontier Tower Community Treasury, governed collectively by humans and AI.
The Moment: AI Convergence Weekend
Our 15th gathering, strategically timed between GDC and NVIDIA GTC, the weekend when 100,000+ tech professionals converge on San Francisco for the industry's biggest AI week.
Frontier Tower is San Francisco's frontier tech hub. This 1908 landmark has floors dedicated to AI, biotech, neurotech, robotics, longevity, decentralized tech, and arts - hosting 700+ gatherings since 2024. This is where we decompress between keynotes, go deeper after side events, and connect with people working on adjacent "impossible" problems.
👉 Running parallel: An overnight hackathon with Protocol Labs across the AI, robotics, and neurotech floors: hands-on hardware, real submissions, and a direct pipeline to Protocol Labs' Founders Forge accelerator. More info soon.
This is for:
Researchers: From frontier labs to academia - stress-test coordination mechanisms on real problems and publish what you learn.
Builders & Founders: Ship something that matters. Whether you're building frontier models, open-source tooling, or decentralized AI infrastructure - find co-founders, funding, and community.
Mechanism Designers: Bring your models, run them live, and see what breaks.
Founders: Building in a world where assumptions keep shifting? Find collaborators who get it.
Policy & Public Sector: The rails for public wealth don't build themselves. Come blueprint them.
Artists & Civic Leaders: Ask the questions nobody else is asking and help us see the blindspots.
🎤 Apply to speak, facilitate, or offer a session.
🙌 Apply to volunteer.
No one will be turned away for lack of funds. If cost is a barrier, reach out to [email protected]
We are not here to be users. We are here to be ancestors.
Presented by Funding the Commons, Frontier Tower, and Protocol Labs.
In partnership with The Tor Project, Foresight Institute, Flourishing Systems Foundation, and Metagov.
Additional sponsors include VESSL.AI, and human.tech.