The tech world isn't really concerned with politics except when they need to be, and on this midterm election night, a bunch of fireworks went off way before any significant races were called, and many SF residents were confused.
Did the Valkyries decide to do an unannounced fireworks show ahead of Wednesday morning's waterborne victory parade? Did some local candidate have a fireworks show that went off too early by accident? Was San Francisco prematurely celebrating the massive blue wave in the national election results?
These were all questions that people had on social media when fireworks started going off over the Embarcadero near Pier 27.
But, much like with those two privately funded, unannounced fireworks shows that angered residents of Telegraph Hill and North Beach, the show that went on for about 10 minutes and started just before 7 pm near Pier 27 on Tuesday night, was linked to private interests, and appropriately enough for our era, it was an AI conference.
As ABC 7 reports, it was a permitted fireworks show, and as the Chronicle notes, the celebration was part of a daylong AI conference hosted by a startup called Fireworks AI, which was founded by former Meta employee Lin Qiao.
The conference, being held for the first time ever, was called Forge 2026, and according to the event listing, "The day is about teams that build on open models and adapt them to their own data and domain: training, fine-tuning, serving and running agents in production."
And, "Talks are expected to cover architectures, tradeoffs and failures from systems that are already shipping, and a call for talks is open on the event site."
Given the name of the company, sure, fireworks seem appropriate. But I guess no one cared that this was Election Day... and yeah, people didn't know what this was about. Maybe PBS projecting that Darlene Graham was losing in South Carolina?
Anyway, yay? Fireworks all the time! Go AI agents!
