Past Events
Invited Speakers
Andrew Byrnes
VP · Uber
Tech Policy Advisor & Attorney; ex-Obama Admin; Senior Legal Director at Uber
Ben Bolte
Founder · K Scale Labs
Benjamin Bolte is a bold AI and robotics innovator, best known as the founder and former CEO of K-Scale Labs, a Y Combinator-backed startup that pioneered affordable, open-source humanoid robots like the K-Bot and Z-Bot to democratize embodied intelligence and accelerate humanity toward a Type I civilization on the Kardashev scale. A Mathematics and Computer Science graduate from Emory University with early research in computational neuroscience, Bolte honed his expertise at Tesla—where he authored CUDA kernels for the voxel occupancy network later adapted for Optimus—and at Meta AI, contributing to robotics foundation models, speech systems, and semantic mapping. Driven by a belief in open-source collaboration over proprietary silos, he launched K-Scale in 2024 from a Palo Alto garage, rapidly building a developer community and shipping initial units before the company ceased operations in late 2025 due to funding challenges; in a final act of principle, Bolte released all hardware and software IP to the public, ensuring his visionary work continues to inspire the next generation of general-purpose robotics.
Berivan Isik
AI Research · Google DeepMind
Berivan Isik is a prominent research scientist at Google DeepMind, specializing in generative AI with a focus on efficient training and finetuning of large language models, pretraining data valuation, scaling laws, differential privacy, and machine unlearning to advance trustworthy AI systems. She earned her PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2024, where she was co-advised by professors Sanmi Koyejo and Tsachy Weissman, and her groundbreaking work earned her prestigious awards including the Stanford Graduate Fellowship and the Google PhD Fellowship in Machine Learning. With a prolific publication record in top venues like ICLR, AISTATS, and ICML—often featuring oral presentations and collaborations on high-impact topics such as federated learning, model compression, and information-theoretic approaches to AI—Isik has established herself as a leading voice in scalable and responsible machine learning, contributing directly to cutting-edge developments in models like Gemini while advocating for privacy-preserving techniques in the era of massive-scale AI.
Bilge Acun
AI Research · Meta
Bilge Acun is a leading research scientist at Meta AI (FAIR) on the Systems for Machine Learning (SysML) team, specializing in sustainable AI, machine learning systems, and distributed computing to address the environmental challenges of scaling massive models amid exploding computational demands. A PhD graduate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign—where her work on power-efficient large-scale systems earned recognition including a cover feature in IEEE Computer and multiple patent-pending innovations—she has driven high-impact projects at Meta, co-authoring seminal papers like "Sustainable AI: Environmental Implications, Challenges and Opportunities" and "Beyond Efficiency: Scaling AI Sustainably," while contributing to frameworks for carbon-aware datacenter design, multi-modal generative AI systems, and benchmarks like DataPerf. With thousands of citations, keynote speeches at MLSys conferences, and a passion for optimizing AI's carbon footprint through renewable energy integration and efficiency gains, Acun continues to pioneer green computing solutions that enable responsible advancement of frontier AI technologies at global scale.
Carmen Li
Founder · Compute Exchange
Carmen Li is an American entrepreneur and fintech innovator renowned for founding Silicon Data, a pioneering platform often called the "Bloomberg of compute" that brings transparency to the volatile GPU and AI infrastructure market through real-time pricing indexes, benchmarks, and risk management tools. A Harvard Business School alumna with prior leadership at Bloomberg LP in enterprise data alliances, she launched Silicon Data in 2024, raising $4.7M in seed funding from investors like DRW and Jump Trading. In 2025, she expanded her role to CEO of Compute Exchange, unifying efforts to build efficient, commodity-like markets for compute resources essential to AI development.
Casey Caruso
Founder · Topology Ventures
Casey Caruso is an American venture capitalist and former software engineer best known as the founder and solo general partner of Topology Ventures, a San Francisco-based early-stage firm she launched in 2024 with a $75 million debut fund focused on frontier technologies including AI, decentralized networks, neurotechnology, aerospace, and robotics. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree (2022), Caruso began writing open-source code at 15, mined cryptocurrency to fund early angel investments, worked as an engineer at Google, served as Bessemer Venture Partners' crypto specialist, and was an investment partner at Paradigm before striking out on her own—drawing backing from notables like Marc Andreessen, an OpenAI cofounder, and Paris Hilton.
Chris Catoya
Founder · The cadCAD Foundation
Chris Catoya is a San Francisco-based technologist and entrepreneur deeply immersed in open-source complex systems modeling, serving as Executive Director of The cadCAD Foundation—the nonprofit stewarding cadCAD, a powerful Python-based open-source framework for designing, simulating, validating, and operating complex adaptive systems through differential games, Monte Carlo analyses, and parameter sweeping, widely adopted in token engineering, decentralized governance, and web3 mechanism design. With a diverse background spanning mobile gaming, fintech, crypto, VR, medtech, and structured finance (CRE CMBS & CDOs), Catoya previously held roles as Program Manager and Product Manager at BlockScience—where cadCAD originated—before co-founding and advising DNS.xyz, a decentralized naming and social platform empowering creators with on-chain identities and websites. A passionate advocate for scaling self-improving processes, automation across network layers, and shaping web3+ ecosystems, he bridges rigorous systems thinking with practical innovation to enable transparent, verifiable modeling for a more collaborative digital future.
Chris Lengerich
Founder · Pioneer Fund
Chris Lengerich is an American machine learning researcher, entrepreneur, and investor focused on leveraging AI to accelerate scientific discovery and eliminate disease. A Stanford alumnus with prior roles as a software engineer at Google X and Meta, he co-founded Context Fund, an initiative building open-source personal AI tools to make scientists and engineers 100x more productive. As a Venture Partner at Pioneer Fund and advisor to firms like ZhenFund, Lengerich invests in early-stage companies across AI, biotech, genomics, and women's health, while advocating for open-source AI and systematic breakthroughs in health and intelligence.
Dave Deriso
Founder · Bluue
Dave Deriso is an American AI researcher, entrepreneur, and artist best known as the founder of Bluue, a biotech startup developing AI-powered hardware for preventative cardiology and early disease detection through advanced medical devices currently in clinical trials. A Stanford-trained computational engineer (MS) and Oxford Neuroscience Marie Curie Fellow with prior research at UCSD and BAIR (Berkeley AI Research), he previously built intelligent routing systems at Caviar (acquired by Square) and lectured on data visualization and algorithmic art at Stanford. Combining expertise in self-supervised learning, sequential data, and neuroscience, Deriso bridges academia, industry, and creative pursuits—including publications in Nature on art and the brain—while based in San Francisco.
Denis Timonin
Founder · FlyMy.AI
Denis Timonin is a pioneering AI engineer and entrepreneur, founder and CEO of FlyMy.AI, a cutting-edge cloud platform specializing in ultra-fast neural network inference, multimodal generative AI agents, and infrastructure for real-time media applications like image, video, and agentic systems. Previously a Lead AI Architect at NVIDIA from 2019 to 2024, he contributed significantly to accelerating large language models—including doubling GPT-3 inference throughput, optimizing Megatron and TensorRT stacks, and achieving record-breaking speeds for GPT and GAN training—while authoring influential technical blogs on transformer inference and large-scale AI deployment. With prior roles as a senior deep learning researcher at Huawei and founder of earlier AI ventures, Timonin has established himself as a self-made expert in high-performance AI systems, now driving FlyMy.AI's mission to deliver the fastest compound AI platform with a team of former NVIDIA, Stability AI, and Yandex engineers, empowering developers to build scalable, low-latency generative applications.
Div Garg
CEO · MultiOn
Div Garg is the CEO of MultiOn, a company focused on AI technologies, particularly in the development of multi-agent systems. He leads the organization in creating innovative AI solutions. Specific details about his background and achievements are not reliably available.
Emmett Shear
CEO · Softmax
Emmett Shear is the founder and CEO of Softmax, and formerly Twitch, the world's leading live streaming service, which he helped build from Justin.tv starting in 2011. He served as Twitch CEO from 2014 until early 2023. In November 2023, he briefly acted as interim CEO of OpenAI before starting Softmax.
George Hotz
Founder · tiny corp
George Hotz is a security hacker, entrepreneur, and software engineer. He is known for developing iOS jailbreaks, reverse engineering the PlayStation 3, and for the subsequent lawsuit brought against him by Sony. From September 2015 onwards, he has been working on his vehicle automation machine learning company comma.ai. Since November 2022, Hotz has been working on tinygrad, a deep learning framework.
Gil Verdon
CEO · Extropic
Guillaume "Gil" Verdon is the founder and CEO of Extropic AI, a San Francisco-based startup pioneering thermodynamic computing—a revolutionary physics-based paradigm that harnesses out-of-equilibrium thermodynamics and probabilistic "p-bits" to create vastly more energy-efficient accelerators for generative AI, promising thousands-fold reductions in power consumption compared to traditional silicon chips while natively supporting advanced energy-based models critical for scaling toward AGI. A Canadian physicist with a PhD in applied mathematics from the University of Waterloo's Institute for Quantum Computing, Verdon previously led quantum machine learning research at Alphabet's X lab, co-creating TensorFlow Quantum before pivoting from noisy quantum hardware to broader thermodynamic approaches amid industry challenges. Doxxed in 2023 as the pseudonymous Beff Jezos—the fiery proponent of effective accelerationism (e/acc), a techno-optimist movement urging unrelenting AI progress against decelerationists—Verdon has leveraged his viral persona to attract talent and hype, raising $14.1M in seed funding and advancing Extropic's chips toward market availability in late 2025, positioning the company as a bold challenger to Nvidia in the exploding AI hardware race for sustainable, abundant computation.
Jacob Buckman
Cofounder · Manifest AI
Jacob Buckman is a visionary deep learning researcher and entrepreneur, serving as co-founder and CEO of Manifest AI, an open-source research lab dedicated to advancing long-context learning through innovative algorithms, architectures, and datasets aimed at modeling all human processes. With prior experience at Google Brain and Microsoft Research, he holds Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and pursued a PhD at McGill University (Mila), contributing highly cited publications at top conferences like NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR on topics including reinforcement learning, representation learning, and transformer alternatives. At Manifest AI, founded in 2023 with collaborator Carles Gelada, Buckman has pioneered breakthroughs such as the Power Retention architecture—offering massive efficiency gains over traditional transformers—and open-source tools like Vidrial and PowerCoder, positioning long-context scaling as the next frontier in overcoming AI limitations like hallucinations and unreliability while pushing toward more capable, reliable systems.
Jamie Joyce
Founder · The Society Library
Jamie Joyce is the founder, President, and Executive Director of The Society Library, a pioneering 501(c)3 nonprofit dedicated to archiving and mapping humanity's diverse ideas, arguments, and ideologies on complex social and political issues through innovative collective intelligence tools, including AI-driven debate modeling and deliberation databases that represent all perspectives—even fringe or marginalized ones—to foster informed decision-making and truth-seeking in an era of information overload. With a background in international sustainable development, where she oversaw projects in over 20 countries and represented NGOs at the United Nations, Joyce previously launched Democracy's Library at the Internet Archive before establishing The Society Library to engineer new digital institutions for epistemic clarity, intellectual freedom, and democratic discourse. An award-winning artist, speaker at events like TEDx and RightsCon, and board member of Wikitongues, she passionately advances civic tech, anti-censorship efforts, and accessible knowledge systems to empower intentional belief formation across society.
Jeremy Nixon
Founder · Omniscience
Jeremy Nixon is a visionary AI researcher, entrepreneur, and community builder whose career bridges cutting-edge machine learning with the pursuit of artificial general intelligence. A Harvard graduate in Applied Mathematics, he spent years at Google Brain advancing deep learning trustworthiness through influential work on model calibration, uncertainty quantification, and automated curriculum learning, contributing to highly cited papers at venues like NeurIPS and CVPR. Driven by a passion for AGI's transformative potential, Nixon co-founded the original AGI House in 2022 alongside Andrej Karpathy—initially as NeoGenesis—before expanding it into a global network of hacker houses and hackathons in San Francisco and beyond, fostering thousands of AI projects, startups, and collaborations among top researchers and founders. As a serial innovator, he also founded Omniscience (developing Omni, an advanced LLM-powered retrieval system) and continues to host high-profile events, debates, and initiatives that shape Silicon Valley's AI renaissance while advocating for safe, ambitious progress toward superintelligence.
Jesse Schmidt
Neuroscience & AI Researcher, Instructor, and Consultant. · Healthcare AI Consultant
Jesse Schmidt is a San Francisco-based interdisciplinary innovator at the forefront of Neuro x AI x Health, blending rigorous neuroscience and psychopharmacology research with cutting-edge artificial intelligence to pioneer systems that enhance human connections, mental health, and scientific discovery through deeply embodied, cybernetic models of the mind. Holding a BSc in Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience—earned cum laude with coursework spanning psychopharmacology, behavioral neuroscience, sensory processes, biochemistry, and biophysics—plus a Master of International Business, Schmidt has published research on topics like fear responses and methamphetamine effects while transitioning into AI applications for complex human systems. Passionate about biophysics, neurotech, bioengineering, consciousness, psychedelics, and mental health, he is currently building a stealth startup in wearable technology to expand the "adjacent possible" across disciplines, advocating for ethical, human-centered innovation that bridges brain science with transformative AI tools for wellness and cognition.
Kartin Wong
CEO · ORA
Kartin Wong is a Chinese-American entrepreneur and innovator in the intersection of blockchain and AI, best known as the co-founder of ORA (formerly Hyper Oracle), a verifiable on-chain AI oracle protocol launched in 2022. With prior experience as a software engineer at Google and tech lead for SRE infrastructure at TikTok, Wong pioneered technologies like opML (Optimistic Machine Learning) for decentralized and verifiable AI inference on blockchains. ORA enables tokenization of AI models through Initial Model Offerings (IMOs), has raised significant funding including $20M rounds, and aims to unlock decentralized AI applications while addressing trust and monetization challenges in Web3.
Michael Tsai
Fmr. Elected Official of Milpitas, CA; Chairman at Santa Clara County. · Sister Counties Commission
Michael Tsai is a dedicated public servant and community leader in Milpitas, California, with a strong commitment to education, sustainable transportation, and international relations. A UC Berkeley graduate in Environmental Economics and Policy, he previously served as an elected trustee on the Milpitas Unified School District Board, overseeing programs for thousands of students, and ran for Milpitas City Council in 2022, emphasizing public safety, housing, and economic recovery. Currently, Tsai chairs the Sister Counties Commission for Santa Clara County, fostering ties between Silicon Valley and Taiwan's Hsinchu County, while also serving as a commissioner for the City of Milpitas and contributing to the California High-Speed Rail Community Working Group. As founder of South Bay YIMBY and owner of an educational consulting firm, he advocates for transit-oriented development and supports students' academic success, bringing analytical expertise and passion for innovative local governance to his ongoing civic roles.
Mike Knoop
Cofounder · Zapier
Mike Knoop is an American entrepreneur and technologist best known as the co-founder of Zapier, the leading no-code automation platform he launched in 2011 with Wade Foster and Bryan Helmig during a Startup Weekend in Columbia, Missouri. Starting as a side project accepted into Y Combinator, Zapier grew into a remote-first unicorn connecting thousands of apps to automate workflows for millions of users. Knoop has held key roles including Head of AI, President, and product leadership, driving innovations in AI integration and agents. Passionate about advancing toward AGI, he co-founded the ARC Prize—a major competition to benchmark progress on abstraction and reasoning—and serves on Zapier's board while exploring new ventures in intelligence science.
Sam Hogan
CEO · Kuzco
Sam Hogan is an American entrepreneur and crypto/AI innovator best known as the founder and CEO of Kuzco, a decentralized GPU network built on Solana that aggregates idle compute resources worldwide for efficient large language model (LLM) inference. Launched in 2024, Kuzco enables users to contribute spare GPU power in exchange for rewards while providing developers cost-effective access to distributed computing via an OpenAI-compatible API, supporting models like Llama and Mistral. Hogan has positioned Kuzco as a key player in the shift toward inference-dominated AI infrastructure, with rapid growth in active nodes and a token launch in late 2024.
Satyam Srivastava
Chief AI SW · d-Matrix
Satyam Srivastava serves as the Chief AI Software at d-Matrix, a company focused on developing AI accelerators and chips. He leads AI software efforts, contributing to advancements in AI technology. Specific details about his background and achievements are not reliably known.
Simeon Bochev
CEO · Compute Exchange
Simeon Bochev is the CEO of Compute Exchange, a decentralized exchange protocol for trading compute capacity, particularly GPUs for AI workloads. He focuses on building infrastructure to enable peer-to-peer compute markets.
Trevor McCourt
CTO · Extropic
Trevor McCourt is the co-founder and CEO of Extropic, a company developing thermodynamic computing technology to enable energy-efficient, massively parallel inference for probabilistic AI models. Extropic's platform leverages non-equilibrium thermodynamics to address the computational demands of generative AI.
Vincent Weisser
Founder · PrimeIntellect
Vincent Weisser is a German-American entrepreneur and decentralized science advocate best known as the co-founder and CEO of Prime Intellect, a San Francisco-based platform launched in 2023 that democratizes large-scale AI training through distributed compute aggregation and open-source models. With a background in software engineering from CODE University and prior roles leading AI ecosystems at Molecule and co-initiating VitaDAO (a longevity research collective), Weisser drives Prime Intellect's mission to commoditize compute, enable collaborative AGI development, and ensure broad distribution of AI benefits—highlighted by releases like the 100B+ parameter INTELLECT-3 MoE model and innovations in decentralized reinforcement learning.
Wachi Bandara
AI · DRW
Wachi Bandara is a professional in the field of AI at DRW, where they contribute to advancements in artificial intelligence technologies. They have spoken at events like 'Democratizing Intelligence: The Future of AI, Compute, and Infrastructure,' highlighting their expertise in AI, compute, and related infrastructure. Their work focuses on democratizing AI applications, drawing from their role in a technology-driven organization.