Head over to our Luma page to get the latest on upcoming AI Collective events near you. Search by city, date, or event format, and join thousands of builders at events across 100+ chapters on every continent (except Antarctica, for now).

🌁 Based in SF? Check out SF IRL, MLOps SF, GenerativeAISF, or Cerebral Valley’s spreadsheet for more!

As the holiday wraps, we want to share our gratitude for this community. The momentum you bring — building, learning, collaborating, and showing up for one another — is what fuels this community’s growth and makes The AI Collective possible.

Whether you joined an event this fall, contributed on stage, or simply kept up with the newsletter, thank you for being part of this work. We hope the long weekend offered rest, perspective, and time with the people who matter most.

Here’s to closing the year strong, together. 🥂

Luana Lopes Lara went from bruised feet in a Rio de Janeiro ballet studio to co-founding Kalshi, the first CFTC-approved event exchange in US history. Alongside co-founder Tarek Mansour, she pushed a radical idea into one of the most conservative corners of finance: a marketplace where people can trade on real-world events like inflation prints, recessions, and election outcomes. 65 attorneys said no. For three years, the answer was to stop.

But instead, they kept going. Today, Kalshi serves hundreds of thousands of traders, has raised more than $400M in capital, and is valued at $5B, with Luana standing out as the only Brazilian on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

Shivani Berry, who captured this most recently on her viral LinkedIn post, uses the story to underline a simple question for ambitious operators, and especially the high-performing moms she writes for: what would you keep fighting for even if everyone told you to quit? It’s a reminder that “unreasonable persistence” is not just a slogan, and that some of the most important financial infrastructure of the next decade will be built by founders willing to stand on a mountain of no until they reach one decisive yes.

Tony Zhao left his Stanford PhD to rethink the robotics stack from first principles. With Cheng Chi and a roster of backers that includes Conviction, Benchmark, and a who’s who of product and infrastructure operators, Sunday Robotics has spent the last year and a half rebuilding everything from hardware to AI, with one clear question in mind: what happens when domestic robots are trained on how people actually move through the world.

Their answer is ACT-1, a frontier robot foundation model trained purely on human data, capable of ultra long-horizon mobile manipulation, zero-shot generalization to new environments, and fine-grained tasks like folding socks or pulling a clean espresso shot. The demo is disarming on purpose: a robot that can change its height on demand, navigate real homes, and feel approachable rather than intimidating. Under the hood, the ambition is larger. ACT-1 suggests a future where robots are not one-off demos locked in labs, but continuously learning systems that adapt to messy, human spaces.

Sairam Sundaresan has done something deceptively powerful: he turned a scattered archive of Stanford AI lectures into a clear, public roadmap for anyone who wants to move beyond prompts and start building real systems. In a single post, he walks through the sequence that trained a generation of Silicon Valley engineers: CS221 for classical AI and search, CS229 and CS229M for machine learning and theory, CS230 and CS231n for deep learning and vision, CS234 for reinforcement learning, and CS224U/N for modern NLP.

The pitch is not that the content is free – though it is – but that it offers a structure most self-taught builders lack. Tools change fast, foundations do not, and the people who will matter in the next wave are those who can design, ship, and debug end-to-end systems. For The AI Collective community, his curriculum functions like an on-ramp and a filter. It gives newcomers a serious path into the field, and it gives teams a simple way to say: if you want to work on the hard problems, start here, then show us what you built.

A few months ago, we asked what you wanted from this newsletter. Since then, the Collective has nearly doubled, and the feedback has been consistent: clearer structure, less noise, and a reliable way to stay current without sifting through endless headlines.

Next week, we’re introducing a refined format to reflect that.

If our newsletter helps you stay informed, share us with someone who should be here. From all of us: Noah, AJ, and Josh, thank you. We can’t wait to show you what’s next.

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Launching a new product or hosting an event? Put your work in front of our global audience of builders, founders, and operators — we feature select products and announcements that offer real value to our readers.

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About Noah Frank

Noah is a researcher, innovation strategist, and ex-founder thinking and writing about the future of AI. His work and body of research focus on aligning governance strategies to anticipate transformative change before it happens.

About AJ Green

AJ Green is a founder, writer, VC scout, chairman, and respected community leader in the AI and startup space. A former athlete turned tech entrepreneur, AJ is on a mission to make AI the great equalizer scaling startups, connecting ecosystems, and turning disruption into opportunity.