East Bay Tech is a curated gathering for founders, developers, and operators who want to explore practical AI, emerging technology, and new business opportunities in the East Bay.
This event is for people building companies, shipping products, improving operations, or exploring how new tools can create real value across industries like healthcare, legal, real estate, and more.
We are bringing together a thoughtful mix of technical and industry voices for conversations that are grounded, useful, and local.
Topics
We are still building this list, but this new month has already started with exciting AI news.
Read whichever items look useful to you. The packet is optional, and skimming even a few of these is enough context for a strong conversation.
Frontier models, open models, and infrastructure
Introducing GPT-5.5
- OpenAI is positioning GPT-5.5 as its smartest and most intuitive model yet, with stronger agentic coding, computer use, knowledge work, and early scientific research.
- The practical claim is that it can carry more of a messy, multi-step task while matching GPT-5.4 per-token latency and using fewer tokens on Codex tasks.
- Good room question: when a model can plan, use tools, check its work, and keep going longer, what should teams actually delegate end-to-end?
Qwen3.6-27B
- Qwen announced Qwen3.6-27B as a dense, open-source model with flagship-level coding performance in a much smaller package.
- The notable claim is outstanding agentic coding, including performance above Qwen3.5-397B-A17B across major coding benchmarks.
- Good room question: how much pressure do smaller strong open models put on closed frontier models for everyday engineering work?
DeepSeek V4 Preview
- DeepSeek-V4 Preview is live with open weights, a 1M context length, and two main variants: V4-Pro for top-tier reasoning and coding, and V4-Flash for faster, cheaper usage.
- The release is especially relevant for agentic coding because DeepSeek calls out OpenClaw, OpenCode, and Claude Code integrations, plus support for both OpenAI Chat Completions and Anthropic APIs.
- Good room question: if open-weight models now combine long context, strong coding, and drop-in API compatibility, what keeps teams locked into closed-model workflows?
NVIDIA's free hosted AI model APIs
- Dhruv highlights NVIDIA offering roughly 80 hosted AI model APIs for free, including MiniMax M2.7, GLM 5.1, Kimi 2.5, DeepSeek 3.2, GPT-OSS-120B, and Sarvam-M.
- This is useful because it turns model choice into a practical integration question for coding tools and agent workflows, not just a leaderboard discussion.
- Good room question: if model access keeps getting cheaper and easier, where does the real bottleneck move, evaluation, workflow design, or distribution?
Come To
- Meet smart people in the East Bay.
- Share real use cases around practical AI.
- Explore partnerships, projects, and business opportunities.
- Connect with founders, developers, and operators across industries.
Format
- Practical, thoughtful conversations for strong local connections.
- Signal over hype.
- Not a pitch night.
- No aggressive selling or constant self-promotion.