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Intelligence at the Frontier: Funding the Commons Festival for AI & Human Flourishing (SF 2026)

Funding the CommonsThu, Apr 9, 2026, 12:00 AM

What does it look like to build for human flourishing in the age of AI? Intelligence at the Frontier was a 36-hour festival, conference, and overnight hackathon across 16 floors of Frontier Tower in San Francisco. 1,000 researchers, builders, artists, funders, and policymakers. Talks, workshops, live music, immersive art, real-time public goods funding experiments—and a lot of great conversations.This is a glimpse of what happened inside. Speakers included Juan Benet (Protocol Labs), Illia Polosukhin (NEAR Protocol), Tom Kalil (Renaissance Philanthropy), Leo Gao (OpenAI), Luke Drago (Workshop Labs), Sheila Warren (fmr. World Economic Forum), Shaw Walters (ElizaOS), and Brian Behlendorf (EFF, Mozilla Foundation), alongside 160+ more voices across AI governance, longevity, sovereign infrastructure, and the coordination systems that determine whether intelligence serves everyone. Filmed at Intelligence at the Frontier, March 14–15, 2026, Frontier Tower, San Francisco. Presented by Funding the Commons, Frontier Tower & Protocol Labs. Learn more: https://fundingthecommons.io

Transcript

Hey everyone, today we have the FWB 6 hour festival in the frontier tower hosted by funding the commons and I'm going to show you some of the behind the scenes. All the floors are active right now. We're currently on floor two, which is where all the talks, keynotes, and sponsors, and tea house, and everything is. But as you go up there's more workshops and talks and there's a hackathon, they have funding experiments. So there's a lot going on in the building today and especially in the 16th and 15th and 14th.

So let's go find out what they're doing. So we're on the 14th floor, extremely busy, a lot of speakers, a lot of workshops. I don't know what's going on right now. I am Sydney. Sydney.

I'm here doing the hackathon. We are producing the Intelligence at the Frontier hackathon with Protocol Labs. Oh, I'm hanging out here. I'm going to a whole bunch of different talks and panels and just really excited to see people I haven't seen in a while. My name's Eli.

We're working on building a cerebral oximeter today as part of the Funding the Commons hackathon. It's amazing. I I I'm born and raised in the Bay Area. Like I love it. Like it's also the tech capital of the world.

You know, you see that in the entrepreneurs that have shown up today. So I'm really excited to be here to be able to support builders and really grateful to have a chance to be a part of it. Okay, welcome to the 16th floor. This is the lounge. So right now there's a lot of panels going on and a lot of natural light.

I love this place. So we have a panel going on right now. The space is really focused on commonsing and and really that interstitial layer that helps make organizing possible. I think those tools are so essential and so often overlooked and under resourced and so I think it's incredible that this context exists. It seems that we have reached the end of this crazy madness of a weekend when in the Commons in the Frontier Tower.

We have had 1,000 people signed up for this event. That includes builders, thinkers, hackers, mentors, creatives, you name it. Right now, we still have some things going on in all the floors. This is a big thank you to everyone that volunteered, came along, and wanted to learn. I know there's a lot of knowledge flowing through all of the the cement of this building right now, and I can't wait for the next one in the Commons, and just for the tower to have more events like this.

Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.