Past Events
Invited Speakers
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 a dynamic AI infrastructure entrepreneur and global tech leader, serving as co-founder and CEO of Compute Exchange, the world's first open marketplace for trading GPUs and compute resources to democratize access, enhance transparency, and fuel innovation in the rapidly scaling AI era—treating compute as a commodity akin to oil or electricity. A University of Texas at Austin electrical engineering alumnus (B.S. 2012, high honors) who later earned an M.S. in Finance and a distinguished Harvard Business School MBA, Bochev built extensive expertise through roles as Head of Product, Strategy & Operations for AI Infrastructure at Apple, VP of Strategy at unicorn Lambda Labs, President of QuantCo APAC, and founder of an AI company in Japan, following early work in U.S. national security engineering. With multi-billion-dollar P&L impact reaching over a billion users, he now advises Fortune 100 CEOs, sits on private boards, and consults governments—including U.S. administrations, EU states, and Japan—on AI and tech policy, passionately advocating for open systems to prevent monopolies and accelerate humanity's technological progress.
Trevor McCourt
CTO · Extropic
Trevor McCourt is a pioneering physicist-engineer and co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Extropic, a breakthrough startup developing thermodynamic computing hardware that harnesses noise and probabilistic physics to accelerate generative AI with dramatically higher energy efficiency—potentially thousands of times better than traditional GPUs—addressing the escalating power constraints limiting AI scaling. With a background in mechanical engineering from the University of Waterloo and advanced research at MIT in quantum control, metrology, and information applied to superconducting and trapped-ion systems, McCourt previously contributed to cutting-edge projects at Alphabet's X (Google Quantum AI) and other roles in quantum programming and hardware. Co-founding Extropic in 2022 alongside CEO Guillaume Verdon, he has guided the company through a $14.1 million seed round and the 2025 unveiling of its first working Thermodynamic Sampling Units (TSUs), positioning thermodynamic paradigms as a post-Moore's Law frontier for probabilistic machine learning and ushering in a new era of physics-native AI acceleration.
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.