Ignite Talks @ The AI Conference 2026

​Ignite Talks @ The AI Conference 2026

​Enlighten us, but make it quick!

​5 minutes. 20 slides. Auto-advancing every 15 seconds, ready or not.

Featuring:

Here's the lineup, ready to copy into the Luma description. The bold and italics should carry over when you paste.

​Speakers

​Ramez Naam: Jagged Minds
Why AI is superhuman at some things and struggles with others, and why it comes down to verifiability. Ramez is sci-fi author (Nexus trilogy) and futurist, and runs Planetary VC.

​Alexander Rose: Creating Man
How AI and compassion shaped his design of the Man Base at Burning Man. Alexander is Director of Long-term Futures at Automattic and director emeritus of The Long Now Foundation. His book Forever Inc. is coming out soon.

Erin Rapacki: Physical AI in Robotics. WTF?
A practitioner's guide to what's real, what's hype and what matters in robotics. Erin has spent 20 years in robotics startups, industrial automation and NVIDIA's Physical AI ecosystem.

​Raza Habib: Machines of Loving Grace
What the poem "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" can tell us about the different ways people think about AI safety. Raza founded Humanloop and is now on the technical staff at Anthropic.

​Eran Sandler: There's No Such Thing as "Just the Model"
The same model can perform very differently depending on the checkpoint, quantization, inference engine, hardware and serving setup. Eran co-authored OAuth and founded LunaRoute, which builds private, fixed-cost AI inference.

​Bryan Bischof: AI for Human Flourishing
Forget the benchmarks: using AI to automate the boring stuff, stretch our ambition and make curiosity cheaper. Bryan leads AI at Theory Ventures and teaches at Rutgers.

​Gideon Lichfield: Democracy 2040
A picture of a working democracy in 2040, with help from AI. Gideon is the former editor-in-chief of WIRED and now writes Futurepolis.

​Emmett Shear:
Emmett is the CEO of Softmax. He was briefly CEO of OpenAI and co-founded Twitch.

​Dave Sifry: Vibes vs. Evidence: I Ran 2,416 AI Code Reviews So You Don't Have to Guess
What actually works in AI coding tools, tested against 147 real bugs. Dave founded Technorati and co-founded Linuxcare, and now runs metafactory.

​Sowjanya Pandruju: Does Your AI Agent Need a Driver's License?
We give AI agents the keys to our code, data and money without any way to say what they're trusted to do. Sowjanya is a Cloud Application Architect at AWS.

​Anthony Scodary: A Prompt Can Be Ignored. A Live Call Can't Be Undone.
Why rules written in a prompt aren't really rules for voice agents in regulated industries. Anthony co-founded Guava and was previously an engineer at NASA JPL.

​Anna DeGiulio: Just AI Foundation: 667,000 Consequences
In Chicago, 667,000 people work in jobs where AI reaches the core of the work. What's coming for them, and what the city can do about it. Anna is with Just AI Foundation.

​Sammy Wegent: Keynope: An Improvised Wrap-Up
Sammy closes the night with an improvised keynote built from the talks you just heard. He is the CEO of Freestyle+.

​No 45-minute deep dives. Just a rapid-fire lineup of builders, researchers, and founders with exactly five minutes to land one idea before the slides move on without them. Expect hard-won lessons from AI in production, opinions someone's coworkers told them not to share, and a demo that may or may not work.

​Hosted by Brady Forrest, founder of Ignite Talks.