Co-founders of Ricursive Intelligence, Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini, outline their thesis that AI should design the chips that train AI. They detail their three-phase plan to first accelerate chip design with AI tools 100,000x faster than current software, then become a 'design-less' platform for custom silicon, and finally achieve vertical integration by building their own chips and models.
Dmitri Dolgov, co-CEO of Waymo, discusses the 20-year journey from the DARPA challenge to full autonomy. He explains the Waymo Foundation Model—a multimodal world action model powering the driver, simulator, and critic—and how their "end-to-end plus" architecture enables superhuman safety and exponential scaling.
Jim Fan of Nvidia outlines the endgame for robotics, arguing it will mirror the successful playbook of Large Language Models. He introduces "The Great Parallel," a roadmap where World Models replace Language Models, and data collection shifts from limited teleoperation to scalable egocentric video, culminating in a future of physical APIs and automated research.
Maxime Labonne from Liquid AI shares a playbook for post-training frontier small models (under 1GB) for on-device deployment. The talk breaks down the LFM2.5 recipe, which includes on-policy preference alignment and agentic reinforcement learning, and addresses unique challenges at the 1B scale, such as capability interference and 'doom loops', offering concrete solutions to build efficient models for tasks like data extraction and tool use.
Wayve CEO Alex Kendall discusses their contrarian, AI-first approach to autonomous driving. He explains their journey from a garage prototype using reinforcement learning to developing a generalizable AI driver that has driven zero-shot in over 500 cities. Kendall emphasizes a strategy focused on licensing this embodied AI for mass-market consumer vehicles—a 100-million-unit-per-year opportunity—rather than building bespoke robotaxis, arguing that the future is an AI that can drive any car, anywhere.
Daniel Lütgehetmann of inait introduces "digital brains," biologically accurate computational models of real brains, as a solution to current AI's limitations in physical world interaction. Unlike traditional AI that struggles with dynamic environments and skill accumulation, these digital brains leverage biologically inspired learning rules to achieve dramatically faster learning in robotics and complex systems, demonstrating potential for real-world adaptability and efficiency.