Daytona & SambaNova AI Builders - San Jose, September 2026
โAn event dedicated to exploring all things AI Engineering!
โEvent partners: SambaNova, You.com & WeAreDevelopers
โโAgenda
โโโโโโ๐ 5:30 pm โ 5:35 pm
Welcome and Opening Remarks
โ๐ค Marijan Cipcic, Principal Events Manager at Daytona
โโโโโโโโ๐ 5:35 pm โ 5:50 pm
Talk "Your Agent's Slowest Tool Is Its Mouse"โ
โ๐ค Muhammad Annas Hashmi, DevRel at Daytona
โโโโโโโโOutline:
โEvery click a GUI agent makes costs a full screenshot and a model round trip, and it only lands if the layout stayed where the model last saw it. Chain a task out of clicks and you have bought seconds of waiting and a context window full of pixels for work a shell one-liner could have done. Screenshots are heavy. Text is light. And a click sequence is the most fragile program ever written. No variables, no error handling, and the only retry is asking the model again.
This talk builds the cost model of computer use. Where the waiting actually comes from, why pixel agents break when nothing is wrong, and the levers that fix it: read structure (a DOM, an accessibility tree) instead of rendering it to an image first, write code instead of emitting one click at a time, and cache what worked so the second run costs nothing. I'll then follow up with a demo of what we're doing at Daytona to address these.
โโ๐ 5:50 pm โ 6:05 pm
Talk "Fast Tokens, More Responsive Agents"
โ๐ค Vasanth Mohan, Head of Dev Rel & Product Marketing @ SambaNova
โโโโโโโโOutline:
โWaiting on an AI agent kills the magic. Every time it reasons, generates, calls a tool, checks the result, and goes again, with todayโs infrastructure, latency stacks up. This lighting talk takes a look at how matching the right processor to each part of the jobโGPUs for prefill, Reconfigurable Dataflow Units (RDUs) for fast decoding, and CPUs for orchestration and tool callsโcan keep those loops moving. The goal is simple: agents that feel fast, fluid, and actually fun and productive to use.
โโ๐ 6:05 pm โ 6:20 pm
Talk "TBA"
โ๐ค Sako M, Staff Software Engineer at You.com
โโโโโโโโOutline:
โTBA
โโ๐ 6:20 pm โ 6:30 pm
Talk "Beyond the Sandbox: Scaling Enterprise-Grade AI Agents for Real Users"
โ๐ค Varshika Gambhir, Staff Research Engineer at Google Labs
โโโโโโโโOutline:
โWeโve all seen the demos: a large language model performing magical feats in a perfectly controlled environment. But what happens when that AI agent leaves the sandbox and meets the messy reality of enterprise workflows, strict compliance, and unpredictable customers?
โToday, the industry is stuck in the "prototype graveyard." Moving from a slick proof-of-concept to a reliable, production-ready agentic product requires a fundamental shift in how we build and evaluate software.
โDrawing on my 0โ1 R&D experience at Google Labsโincluding architecting Googleโs first cross-modality AI agent, Ask Advisorโthis keynote bridges the gap between foundational ML research and massively scalable infrastructure. We will explore the technical and strategic playbook required to transform legacy systems into robust, multi-billion-dollar agentic solutions.
โKey Takeaways:
โArchitecting for Agency: Designing cross-modality, multi-agent architectures that survive complex enterprise environments.
โEvaluating the Unpredictable: Implementing advanced LLM-as-a-judge evaluation loops to guarantee reliability.
โThe Deterministic Bridge: Wrapping non-deterministic AI in strict guardrails, state management, and fallback mechanisms.
โ0โ1->100 to Massive Scale: The operational blueprint for moving R&D prototypes to trusted, customer-facing products
โโ๐ 6:30 pm โ 6:40 pm
Talk "Auto-Research on a Budget: Small Models in the Loop, Frontier Models on Call"
โ๐ค Vashishtha Patil, Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon
โโโโโโโโOutline:
โAutonomous research agents that propose, implement, and refine ML solutions have gotten remarkably good. They have also inherited an assumption that excludes most teams: a frontier model drives every step of the loop. That assumption matters because loop cost, not model quality, is becoming the limit on how much autonomy a team can afford to run.
โThis talk explores inverting it. A small open-weight model runs the loop, and a frontier model is called in only as an advisor, on a metered budget.
โWe'll cover what the literature establishes about small and large model collaboration, including step-level escalation, agent distillation, and budget allocation, and where it stops short for long-horizon loops, whose failure modes are not bad tool calls but dead branches, validation leaks, and unclear stopping points.
โWe'll look at a framework for deciding when advice is worth buying, how much of a trajectory an advisor needs to see, and how to measure guidance rather than assume its value. We will walk through a recorded run showing the loop, the trigger, and the cost meter together.
โThe session concludes with open problems, including asynchronous advisors, persistent guidance, and what cost-aware autonomy means for teams without frontier budgets.
โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ๐ 6:40 pm - 8:30 pm
โโโNetworking
โWith pizzas and beverages
โAbout event
โThis is dynamic gathering for AI enthusiasts, innovators, and professionals to collaborate, share ideas, and explore the latest advancements in artificial intelligence. Whether you're building AI products, researching cutting-edge algorithms, or simply passionate about the field, join us to connect, learn, and drive the future of AI forward.
