Funding the Commons SF: Intelligence at the Frontier
Join Funding the Commons for a 16-floor vertical festival in the newly inhabited Frontier Tower. Intelligence at the Frontier blends conference, workshops, hackathon, and music and arts festival for a 36-hour immersive experience co-designing the super intelligence coordination infrastructure for a future that promotes human flourishing.
More than 1,000 researchers, builders, investors, policy-makers, artists and organizers are inhabiting the Frontier Tower for dozens of concurrent, themed tracks: talks from world-class researchers and builders, prototyping labs, live music, DJ'd dance parties, tea lounges and cafes, intelligence hackathons, immersive art experiences, co-design labs, facilitated discussions, and more.
Intelligence at the Frontier is a live experiment in funding the commons: each floor of the tower operates as a semi-autonomous zone with its own budget allocation. Floor leads have full autonomy over programming and spending, with one condition: they must document and publish their governance mechanism. 20% of event profits flow into a new Frontier Tower community treasury, co-governed by humans and AI.
The festival takes place over the March 14-15 weekend between GDC and NVIDIA GTC (when 100k tech professionals are visiting San Francisco) in the former Burning Man HQ and newly founded vertical village for frontier tech that's hosted the likes of Kevin Rose, Vitalik Buterin, Lynne Twist, Marian Godell, Naval Ravikant, Tim Draper, Grimes and many others.
We invite you to join us in designing the future of intelligence.
👉 Agenda available here
👉 Hackathon application & registration here
A 16-FLOOR VERTICAL VILLAGE. EACH FLOOR ITS OWN WORLD.
🚀 Spaceship & Main Stage (Floor 2): Speakers include the co-author of the Transformer paper, former White House science policy leads, and researchers from Harvard, UNICEF, the Internet Archive, and the World Economic Forum. AI-assisted funding, public AI infrastructure, and the coordination systems that determine whether intelligence serves everyone or just the people who own the compute.
👉 Agenda available here
👉 Hackathon application & registration here
🌱 Flourishing (Floor 14): March 14th: inner, relational, and cultural commons. March 15th: Earth Commons. Two days of honest dialogue and hands on co-design labs to explore how AI might serve Life instead of just optimizing it.
💎 Ethereum House (Floor 12): Live funding experiments in action. Quadratic funding rounds, open agent economy demos, and working sessions where researchers and builders leave with actual grants. Not a panel about funding. Funding happening in real time.
🧬 Health & Longevity (Floor 11): Live long enough to see the far future. Biotech demos, longevity research, and the community building Viva.city.
⚡ AI & Autonomous Systems (Floor 9): Hands-on workshops, motion capture demos, GPU compute access, and salons exploring post-labor economics. If you're building agents, this is your floor.
🧠 Neuro & Biotech (Floor 8): Community biolab with hands-on workshops—test your own genetics, test your local water supply, hear how founders cured their own diseases. Pharia Health brain stimulation demos on-site.
🔧 Maker Space (Floor 7): 4,000 sq ft prototyping lab. Laser cutters, 3D printers, CNCs. Bring a napkin sketch, leave with something real.
🎨 Arts & Music (Floor 6): Creativity can't be automated. A curated gallery, talks on where technology meets the arts, and live music rolling through the afternoon. When the sun goes down, the building becomes a late-night electronic music venue. Both nights. Until sunrise.
🤖 Robotics & Hard Tech (Floor 4): Overnight hackathon with Protocol Labs. Open-source robotics, physical AI, and the question of who funds hardware for human flourishing. Show up with an idea, leave with a prototype and a grant.
SPEAKERS
Main stage headliners plus dozens more across each programming floor.
Illia Polosukhin (co-author of the Transformer paper, NEAR Protocol)
Adam Russell (NIST: Center for AI Standards and Innovation)
Tom Kalil (Renaissance Philanthropy; fmr. White House science policy)
Brian Behlendorf (Board at EFF, Mozilla Foundation, fmr Linux Foundation Chief AI Strategist)
Sheila Warren (Board, Bermuda Monetary Authority, fmr. World Economic Forum, Deputy Global Head, Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution)
Omri Drory (NFX VC)
Sam Klein (Public AI, Harvard Berkman Klein Center)
Joshua Tan (Metagov, Public AI)
Max Song (PHD Ventures, World Economic Forum)
Devinder Sodhi (Learning Layer Labs)
ARTS & MUSIC
Shared experience is the oldest coordination mechanism we have. Gallery and live music fill the days. When the sun goes down, multi-genre dancehalls take over three floors of live and electronic music until sunrise. Consider this the unofficial afterparty for AI week.
Live Music: The Futurelics
DJs: Rich DDT · Bench · Jenn Li (SSEDA) · More headliners coming soon
Immerisia: 360 sound and light immersive experience from David Starfire and Steve Comeau. A multisensory installation where participants hear, see, and feel music through a 12-speaker surround sound system, LED matrix lighting, and a vibroacoustic bed.
Tickets are limited—once floors hit capacity, we cap registration.
No one will be turned away for lack of funds. If cost is a barrier, reach out to [email protected]
Accommodation
Superhero Hotel (825 Sutter St, Nob Hill) is offering discounted stays for attendees. A 110-room residency for founders, builders, and hackers, a 15-minute walk from the venue.
Speakers: 45% off · Attendees: 25% off Book at superhero.frontiertower.io
None of this would exist without those who chose the long game. 👇
Presented by Funding the Commons, Frontier Tower, and Protocol Labs. Additional sponsors include ElevenLabs, Bittensor, Activeloop, DeepLake, Solana, VESSL.AI, Velda, Filecoin Foundation, NEAR, Hypercerts Foundation, Octant, Solo Tech, Nomadic ML, human.tech, and Optimized Foods.
In partnership with The Tor Project, Internet Archive, Foresight Institute, Advanced AI Society, Flourishing Systems Foundation, UNICEF Office of Innovation, Founder Institute, ETHSF, and Metagov. Our floor partners are Quorum1, Biopunk Labs, Viva.City, UFB, Ethhouse.xyz, GTM at the Edge and Learning Layer Labs. Experience partners include Tea Tribe and Rich DDT. Food sponsors are Optimized Foods.