Cerebral Valley, the AI conference that spawned a $1.3 billion deal, is coming back to San Francisco this year
Sep 19, 2023, 21:15 IST
- CVAI2 will take place on November 15 at the SFJAZZ Center in Hayes Valley, San Francisco.
- The first event set in motion a giant AI startup deal.
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When your conference leads to one of the biggest AI startup acquisitions ever, you probably want to organize another event soonish.
This is exactly what's happening. Cerebral Valley, an AI conference run by Eric Newcomer's eponymous publication, just announced its second gathering of 2023.
CVAI2 (Cerebral Valley AI Summit version 2.0) will take place on November 15 at the SFJAZZ Center in Hayes Valley, San Francisco. The neighborhood is nicknamed Cerebral Valley these days, due to the plethora of AI startups that have sprouted there.
Newcomer, one of the top VC reporters out there, plans to bring together 300 to 350 of the leading founders and investors in AI for the one-day conference. You have to be pretty fancy to attend this event, which is by invitation only. Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis until full. If you're interested, you can apply to attend at cerebralvalleysummit.com.The speaker line-up is impressive and includes: Vinod Khosla, Reid Hoffman, Mustafa Suleyman (Inflection AI), Ali Ghodsi (Databricks), Kanjun Qiu (Imbue), Chris Lattner (Modular AI), May Habib (Writer), Adam D'Angelo (Quora and OpenAI board member), Naveen Rao (MosaicML), and Jason Warner (Poolside).Newcomer, who writes the startups and VC newsletter Newcomer, will emcee the event. Volley co-founders Max Child and James Wilsterman will also moderate panels.The first summit, held on March 30, was a hit and really captured the frenetic pace of developments and investment happening in AI right now.Industry leaders such Amjad Masad (Replit), Clem Delangue (Hugging Face), Emad Mostaque (Stability AI), Daniela Amodei (Anthropic), Cristobal Valenzuela (Runway), and Shane Orlick (Jasper) showed up.There were also 2 pretty important founders in the audience that day. Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks, and Naveen Rao, CEO of MosaicML, met for the first time at the initial Cerebral Valley AI Summit.They got talking there, and continued the conversation in the following weeks and months. The relationship blossomed and resulted in Databricks buying MosaicML for $1.3 billion.That's the biggest generative AI startup deal so far, by my counting.Did Newcomer get a finder's fee, I wondered? He responded with a definitive "no.""It turns out journalism is a much worse business model than investment banking," Newcomer added. "But I can't complain too much: Two AI conferences in one year — it's been a wild 2023. I guess I'm building Sun Valley for AI without the right fee model."