Eric Newcomer is bringing his Cerebral Valley AI Summit to New York

• The conference is a gathering place for influential investors and founders across generative AI.
• The 2023 conference in San Francisco became famous for producing one of the biggest AI deals.

The Cerebral Valley AI Summit, the generative AI conference created by tech journalist Eric Newcomer and AI startup Volley, will be hosting its first New York event on June 27th. Cerebral Valley New York as the event is being called, will bring together investors and founders for a one day conference to discuss the future of this booming industry.

The original Cerebral Valley Summit, held in the Hayes Valley neighborhood of San Francisco in 2023, made headlines for producing one of the largest generative AI acquisitions ever and effectively firing the starting gun on the AI arms race. Now Newcomer tells Business Insider he thinks the time is right for an eastward expansion.

"I definitely think San Francisco is the heart of the generative AI world," he said, "but I live in New York, I believe in the New York tech ecosystem."

He says Cerebral Valley will continue to host its San Francisco-based conference but with Cerebral Valley New York, the hope is to attract New York financial muscle as well as more attendees from Europe, which now boasts major AI research labs from both Google and Meta, as well as the headquarters of OpenAI rival Mistral.

"We're trying to bring together the actual people making the news and so if you're in the middle of AI, this is where it is, so that's where you should be," he said.

Newcomer anticipates that the conference will be dominated by questions of what AI investing looks like beyond foundation models, who's going to crack the killer app for generative AI, and what's in store for the 800 pound gorilla in the room.

"I think there'll be a lot of reckoning around OpenAI's position," Newcomer said. At the last Cerebral Valley Summit in November, 2023, it was a given that OpenAI had already won the AI battle. Just two days late of course, CEO Sam Altman would be out of a job and the company's future looked uncertain.

Today with Altman back at the helm OpenAI continues to outpace competitors in LLM research, and the company will likely be top of mind for most of the attendees at the conference.

Cerebral Valley will be announcing this year's lineup of speakers over the coming weeks. Past speakers have included Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi, legendary investors such as Reid Hoffman and Vinod Khosla, and Anthropic co-founder Daniela Amodei.

At the very first Cerebral Valley AI Summit, Newcomer half-jokingly challenged someone to raise $100 million at the conference. What he got instead was the $1.3 billion acquisition by Databricks of MosaicML, negotiated over dinner at the summit.

"Clearly I thought too small," said Newcomer, who hopes to outdo himself this year. "I'm cheering for a multi-billion dollar deal now, and you know the activity level could certainly justify it," he said.