SF has a way of plugging you into the hive mind like nowhere else — a city-wide neural network of smart, driven people putting their receptors out to connect. You feel it within a week. Your brain ports onto a denser bandwidth, and stays there.

San Francisco feels like it’s made up of dozens of cities stitched together, each with its own rhythm, culture, even microclimate. Blue Bottles and Cafe Réveilles are nodes across FiDi, Pacific Heights, Mission Bay — their density produces serendipity, and you overhear conversations that only happen in SF. Jackson Square, where Cindy and I have planted our flag — we think it’s going to be SF’s cultural epicentre. The Embarcadero, the preferred stretch for walking meetings, where you overhear fundraises, hiring, and half a dozen AI startup roadmaps in the space of a mile. Loft parties where people introduce themselves by elevator pitch — and call it at 10pm sharp, per Whoop / Oura schedules.

And Waymos glue it all together (the price of a 30-minute ride came down from >$30 to $11 in the six weeks I was in SF).

My perspective this trip was shaped by every kind of room SF runs for builders. Gravity wells in the form of residencies and hacker houses where they live and ship together — HF0, Founder Embassy, The Residency, Frontier Tower, Draper U, AGI House. Curated enterprise dinners (Cerebras, AWS). Founder-and-dev mixers (500 Global, Mission Control, YC). Dev meetups (AI+, the AI Nerd Meetup with Fireworks & Juicebox). Research-lab nights (Nous, MiniMax). Demo days, including at least one with a live chicken on stage (I’ll get to that in a later dispatch). Government-and-sovereign dinners — hosted by Singapore Global Network, EDB, MDDI, including the Makan with RAISE SG in Santa Cruz. Conferences and their side events — GTC, RSAC, HumanX.

The shorthand, after six weeks: SF is home to a massively disproportionate share of the best builders in the world. They’re heads-down building. They’re working on gold, and the gold is siloed. The bridges between them — across houses, across communities, and most especially across continents — need to be built. For technology to diffuse globally, we need to become the bridge.

So let me start here.

About three weeks into the trip, I met Jared Koh of Singapore’s Economic Development Board in the Transamerica Pyramid.

EDB is running the same thesis I’d been sketching on the backs of menus — the frontier builders need neutral ground to cross, Singapore is uniquely positioned to be it, and someone has to build the institutional wrap around it. Government-backed compute. Institutional reliability. A geopolitical meeting ground in an increasingly polarised US-China world.

Through SuperAI in 2025 we’d already brought builders from 150+ countries into one of the industry’s largest cross-ecosystem gatherings. I came to SF to extend the bridge further. Sitting with Jared, I was excited to find that EDB and a number of other Singaporean government agencies were pushing the same thesis from the sovereign side. Same work, different entrance. That was the meeting where I stopped thinking of myself as running in parallel to the Singapore government thesis — and started thinking of myself as running the same playbook from the other side of the table.

The week after was GTC, and it gave me a kind of conference-organiser culture shock that conditioned how I saw everything else in the Bay Area. GTC disappointed on the basics: 30,000+ attendees and a world-class speaker lineup; but pay-to-play food, long walks under the blazing sun, coffee queues long enough to kill any side conversation, and not a trace of service with a smile. A far cry from the standard we uphold at SuperAI and TOKEN2049, where unreasonable hospitality is the product. None of which takes away from the extraordinary ecosystem NVIDIA has catalysed — between the main stage and the side events across SF, GTC week was one of the richest downloads of the trip.

At a Nous Research event that week, the room was split — half the people I talked to were quietly skeptical, reading Nous as burning VC money on “research” with nothing to ship. A few weeks later, Nous’ Hermes Agent has climbed to #2 on OpenRouter’s most-used AI apps list, on pace to flip OpenClaw. The same room had already rotated — polarised in the opposite direction.

Same weekend at a MiniMax event across town, the Kimi team had just come out publicly that Kimi K2.5 had provided the foundation for Cursor’s Composer 2; Cursor confirmed later. The team’s handling of the moment was admirable — diplomatic, constructive, the kind of behaviour you see from teams uninterested in the scoreboard. The people doing some of the most important work in the Bay Area are committed to building open source AI, and they are shipping.

Post-GTC, the texture at neighbourhood scale was just as specific. SF’s builder culture is more than one community — it’s several concentrated ones, largely unaware of each other. I discussed this with Teddy, who runs the beautiful Embassy (@founderembassy) in Pac Heights. The people in the houses aren’t insular. They’re busy. The best builders are heads-down by design. Which means the rooms where they cross each other don’t happen by accident: they have to be built.

In parallel, Balaji sent me down a rabbit hole on what the privacy-first stack for AI actually looks like in practice. He shared his upcoming SuperAI June talk on “Personal, Programmable, Private”, and emphasised his views on the core importance of Zcash as a cryptoasset. The rabbit hole kept surfacing the same substance from three different angles.

It ran through Funding the Commons at Frontier Tower, where David Sneider of Lit Protocol gave a talk on agent-to-agent payments, TEEs, and private MCPs — one of the most strategically relevant sessions I attended in SF.

It ran through Friday-night banyas with the SaunaDAO gang, where Koh Harada — CEO of Aleo, a privacy-focused layer 1 — walked me through his Proof of Human thesis. Once agents handle the search, scheduling, introductions, filtering, human attention becomes the single scarcest commodity in the stack. The curated room of real humans across a table stops being a luxury. It becomes infrastructure.

And it ran through an Embarcadero walk with Junha Yang, a Korean AI security researcher thinking hard about where the frontier shifts once the big labs have trained on the entire public dataset. His answer: private networks of high-signal, verified individuals — with signalling and trust as the core design problems.

By week four I’d had the same conversation with SF founders fifty times. Someone would bring up Singapore / Southeast Asia. Their eyes would light up. Then: “Let me do a quick trip.” “Something small first.” “Take me for chilli crab.” Everyone was dabbling. Nobody was committing.

So I stopped talking and built the dinner.

A month into the trip, I hosted my first Pax Silica dinner in SF. The premise fit cleanly into the thesis we’ve been running through SuperAI — bringing the most innovative frontier builders from East and West into the same room to connect, deliberately, with the composition doing the work. The table was built across four layers: builder community (across the SF gravity wells), infrastructure (compute and data centres), model developers (US and Asia), and capital (sovereign and private, East and West).

Several of the people at that table met each other’s orbits for the first time that night. Some lived two miles apart in SF. Some had been flying between the hemispheres six times a year without ever being introduced. The builders don’t need more conferences. They need someone to hold the right room, often enough that crossing the room becomes a habit. And they need the Personal, Programmable, Private tech stack to keep those connections alive the rest of the year.

A bridge is a guest list, a seating chart, and a group chat six months later.

The tulip fields are thinning. We’re closer to the coast now, the wind has shifted, and it’s starting to rain the way it only rains here — softly and with conviction. I’ll probably post this from a café in Amsterdam tonight, after Cindy and I find a bitterballen spot that isn’t entirely tourists. Note that I haven’t spotted any Claude Code terminals here.

A few more days here, then Singapore — deep immersion into the field at the other end of the bridge. The work is about building those rooms into something that compounds: an open, private network where the best innovators find each other, where signal stays high, and where the bridge carries weight in both directions.

Dinners #01 — what actually happens inside a Pax Silica night — drops soon. The next Field Notes will be from the noisy, demo-day, live-chicken-in-the-auditorium side of SF I’m already a little bit missing.

Until then — Amsterdam, tulips, and a few focused days on this side of the bridge.

Field Notes is a recurring column on the global AI frontier, published on paxsilica.io. New editions arrive between trips. Dinners is its sister column — retrospectives and room craft from inside the Pax Silica dinner series.