Cyrus Clarke, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab, connected an OpenClaw agent to a 900-pin shape display and asked it to discover its own identity rather than complete tasks. The talk covers the agent's first behaviors, the public reaction, the philosophical influences behind his approach to AI embodiment, and a closed-loop system that taught the agent a gesture-based body language that now responds faster than its language model.
Suchet Bargoti, Skydio's Director of Inspection and Mapping, demos a fleet of docked drones orchestrated through an agentic layer, then explains how full-stack autonomy, maps as world models, edge-cloud splitting, VLM-driven tracking and the limits of end-to-end learning combine to make drones function as infrastructure.
The AI Engineer Paris 2026 main stage featured discussions on the historical impact of AI as a general-purpose technology, the evolving landscape of AI engineering towards sophisticated "software factories," and Mistral AI's strategic vision for building frontier AI, ensuring agentic safety, and addressing data sovereignty through advanced models and infrastructure.
Andrew Dai discusses how current frontier models struggle with visual reasoning, often hallucinating or failing to understand spatial relationships and context. He highlights limitations of existing benchmarks and proposes a 'visual thinking' paradigm, exemplified by Elorian's approach using native visual chain of thought, new data, and architectural advances to tackle real-world challenges in robotics, construction, and mechanical design.
Replit founder Amjad Masad and HAA co-founder Gagan Biyani discuss the future of education in the AI era. They argue for fostering young people's natural inclination to question norms, advocating for project-based, curiosity-driven learning over traditional, prescriptive models. The conversation also explores the pitfalls of premature startup professionalization, the evolving nature of work with AI, and the critical importance of trust, discernment, and personal development in tech's high-stakes environment.
Eric Nguyen, CEO of Radical Numerics, details the journey from early genome language models to Omni, a system that excels in DNA reading, writing, and reasoning. Omni outperforms specialized models in disease-variant prediction, particularly in previously challenging non-coding regions. The discussion also covers the critical need for AI-native biosecurity defenses, addressing how models can design biological sequences that evade current detection systems, and the broader vision for General Biological Intelligence.