I am at SF Tech week so I don't have time to record this week. Next week, I'll be back with a recording.

On our first official morning in San Francisco, we woke up as a family in our new, empty apartment and Jon turned to me and said, “Did we just blow our lives up?”

Still in the dark, eyemask on, I reflected quietly.

It’s scary to start over again. We’d been in New York for years. We had friends, and family, and careers, and we were locals at our neighborhood restaurant. We had built a whole life and we knew it well. We knew exactly what New York was and what life in New York could be.

But we also knew we’d outgrown it. We didn’t know why we’d outgrown it, we just knew.

So two things were true at once: we were comfortable, and happy, and yet we knew it wasn’t the place for us anymore.

When I moved from Chicago to New York 10 years prior, people told me, “Moving to New York won’t solve your problems.” But moving did solve all my problems!

Moving to New York was one of my best decisions. Without it, there’d be no SheFi, no Jon Wu, and no Summer Jeanne. I had no way of knowing how life would unfold when I got there, but I trusted my gut, and it worked out better than I could have imagined.

Starting over in New York forced me to reinvent my life. Where I’d been comfortable in Chicago, New York pushed me far outside my comfort zone.

When I got there I had no friends, no connections, and therefore nothing to lose. That discomfort shook me into a new state, and with no community I had to be more proactive to take advantage of what New York had to offer.

It was New Person Energy. It was a chance to reinvent myself. No one knew who I was, so there were no expectations of who I was supposed to be.

At first that feeling can be lonely. And, weirdly, overwhelming. A combination of “I don’t have friends” + “I live in the bustling center of the universe.”

That’s the thing about new places: they make you behave differently. Things that are hard to do in your old home might be easy to do in your new one, and vice versa.

As we walked over to our new neighborhood coffee shop that morning, our momentary fears dissipated. For this phase of our life–focusing on our careers, our family, and on Summer–San Francisco just felt right.

It’s the right place for us to become new again.

If you’re in the Bay Area, send me a note, I’d love to get a coffee!

Frontier Tech Roundup — SheFi Edition 🏇

• Anthropic has spent months meeting privately with religious scholars about whether Claude could be conscious, and its researchers eventually took that argument to the Vatican. Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah has been convening religious thinkers to discuss whether AI systems could have moral status and how centuries of religious thinking might help shape Claude’s values. When Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical on AI, he took a much firmer position: machines don’t have bodies, undergo experiences or feel joy and pain. Olah reportedly considered pulling out of the Vatican launch event over the disagreement, but attended and argued that Anthropic has seen internal states in its models that resemble fear, grief and introspection. The Pope’s position remained unchanged. The New York Times reported on Anthropic’s private meetings with religious scholars and its conversations at the Vatican, which makes this a fascinating collision between Silicon Valley’s uncertainty about machine consciousness and the Church’s much firmer definition of what makes a human, human.

• Google just put an AI chip in space. The first prototype satellite for Project Suncatcher launched on October 1 carrying Google TPUs, the chips it uses to train and run AI. Google is testing whether they can withstand radiation, extreme temperatures and the physical stress of spaceflight. The longer-term idea is much bigger: putting large-scale AI computing infrastructure in orbit, where satellites could eventually access near-continuous solar power. For now, Google is very clear that this is a research project, not a space data center ready for deployment. Still, we spend so much time talking about the physical constraints of AI on Earth, especially power, land and cooling, that moving some of that infrastructure off the planet is no longer just science fiction.

• California became the first state to require a human to review certain AI-driven decisions to discipline or fire workers. Governor Gavin Newsom signed a package of new AI workplace laws that prohibits employers from relying solely on automated systems when making disciplinary or termination decisions. Companies will also have to disclose when AI causes certain mass layoffs or relocations, while other laws limit workplace surveillance and require human judgment in areas like medicine and law. An employer can use AI to flag someone for discipline or termination, but a person still has to review and own the decision.

• A security incident at MetaMask’s staking operation caused an estimated 17,000 Ethereum validators holding about 523,000 ETH to head for the exits. The strange part is how little money appears to have been stolen. An independent onchain researcher estimated that an attacker redirected only about 0.36 ETH, less than $1,000, in validator rewards. MetaMask responded by proactively exiting affected validators while it investigates. The company says it has found no evidence that MetaMask wallets or customer funds were affected. The 17,000-validator and 523,000-ETH figures come from outside researchers rather than MetaMask, but the episode still shows how a relatively small infrastructure compromise can create a huge operational response when billions of dollars of crypto are involved. (coindesk.com)

• The White House has officially renamed artificial intelligence “Super Intelligence” across the executive branch and created a Super Intelligence Force to coordinate federal AI policy. President Trump’s September 29 executive order instructs federal agencies to use “Super Intelligence” or “SI” instead of AI in official communications and directs the government to create a formal definition for the term. A new federal task force announced days later will be led by Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton, with officials from the FTC, Pentagon and Office of Personnel Management. Whatever you think of the branding, the federal government is treating advanced AI as its own strategic category, with economic competitiveness and national security wrapped into the same policy agenda. (whitehouse.gov)

• Pew tested whether AI-generated people could replace humans in public opinion research, and the answer was pretty clearly no. Researchers gave an AI detailed profiles of real Americans and asked it to answer nearly 300 survey questions as their “digital twins.” Across three surveys, the synthetic responses differed from the actual human results by an average of about 12 percentage points. The errors were even larger for some groups, including Black Americans and Republicans. Pew also found the AI personas tended to know far more factual information than the humans they were supposed to represent. This is one study using specific models and survey methods, so 12% is not a universal AI error rate. But it’s a useful warning for companies rushing to replace interviews, surveys and user research with synthetic customers. Pew’s full experiment

• A new real-time video AI convinced 48% of participants in a small study that they were talking to a real person. Tavus launched Griffin, a model that generates a face-to-face conversation in real time, including speech, facial expressions and reactions. In Tavus’s own study, 26 of 54 people said afterward that they thought they had been talking to a real person. This was a small study run by the company behind the model, so 48% should not be treated as a universal measure of how convincing AI video has become. But it does make me think it’s time to get serious about AI impersonation. Call your family, especially elderly parents, and agree on a safe word or phrase that only you would know (ideally you don't do this over the phone but in person). If they ever get a frantic call or video that looks and sounds like you asking for money or help, they can ask for the phrase before believing it’s you.

• Lloyds and Visa settled $750,000 in cross-border payments using stablecoins, with the money reaching Visa in under an hour. The companies ran a seven-day live pilot that continued through the weekend and tested settlement across both public and private blockchain infrastructure. Traditional cross-border settlement still depends heavily on banking hours, which means transactions can be delayed overnight or across weekends. In this test, stablecoins allowed settlement to happen around the clock. I like this story because it’s an example of crypto infrastructure doing something fairly boring and extremely useful. Lloyds and Visa aren’t launching a token or making a prediction about the future. They moved real money and tested whether the rails worked.

SheFi Global Events + Opportunities 🌎

Stay connected with SheFi around the world. From meetups and summits to workshops and special partner events, this is where you’ll find the can’t-miss gatherings happening across our global community.

An exclusive offer for the SheFi community

Join us at Sui Basecamp 2026 on October 7–8 at Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, in partnership with TOKEN2049.

A standard pass is normally US$299. Yours is complimentary with code SHEFI-BASECAMP-100.

Claim your free ticket →

What to look forward to at Sui Basecamp:

• Leading voices in AI and finance. Hear from Raoul Pal (Real Vision), Richard Socher (Recursive / You.com), Michaël van de Poppe (MN Capital), Brian Quintenz (Sui Group Holdings; former CFTC Commissioner), Alexandre Moufarek (Google DeepMind), and more.

• Live trading competition. Cheer on invited traders as they go head-to-head on stage, with live commentary bringing you into the action.

• AI poker. Watch leading AI models face off at the poker table and guess which one will come out on top.

• Hot Seat. Ask founders and execs spicy questions while they eat even spicier food.

• AI Builder Lab workshops. Bring your ideas and curiosity to expert-led workshops and learn to turn a prompt into a working app or agent.

• A record attempt, live on stage. On October 7, watch us attempt to beat Sui’s record of 6M+ transactions per second. Predict the result for a chance to win 10,000 SUI.

Come explore building a future where AI agents transact and own assets, alongside the people behind the technology making it all possible.

Claim your free ticket →

Crypto Events 🌎

Going to ETHCC, Token2049 or Devcon? Join our Global Events Telegram Chat: https://t.me/shefisummit

• 10/07 Beyoğlu: VIP MIXER by Ludus, Unity, Leus, Aghanim: RSVP here

• 10/08 San Francisco: InTheRoom: Trust, Presence & Connection - #SFTechWeek: RSVP here

• 10/16 Washington: Groundwork: RSVP here

• 10/16 Dallas: FEMHACK [DALLAS]: All-Female Hackathon: RSVP here

• 10/17 Dallas: FemHack Pitch + Happy Hour: RSVP here

• 10/19 Florianópolis: IslandDAO v5: Florianópolis Brazil: RSVP here

• 10/25 Chicago: BRING IT TO LIFE: A HALLOWEEN BUILDATHON, GAME LAB & PARTY: RSVP here

• 11/17-18 Florida: EthWomen Florida: RSVP here

• Volunteer x Web3Privacy Now: Sign up here

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