Startup Pitch & Networking in San Francisco

Make your own frontier November 2 | San Francisco Fireworks, Microsoft, and NVIDIA are handing you one challenge: take open models and make your own frontier, on a task you define. Train a specialized model, build a smarter harness, route across models, whatever gets you there. Best result wins $10,000! The challenge Pick a task you care about and deploy a model that serves it in production. Build an eval using your own data, synthetic data, or a public set. Then measure the tradeoffs your deployment makes: quality vs. efficiency, accuracy vs. latency, pass rate vs. cost. Tune at least one dimension against your baseline, show the business value, and show how far you pushed it. Think you can make it? Let's see it! Top prizes + additional 1st place: $10,000 2nd place: $5,000 3rd place: $3,000 +NVIDIA DGX Spark, and others! Agenda (subject to change) 9:00 AM Doors open 10:30 AM Build begins 4:30 PM Submissions close, judging begins, reception & networking 7:00 PM Demos and awards Breakfast, lunch, snacks, and drinks served throughout. Early bird gets the worm! Must have an approved registration and once we are at max capacity the doors will be closed. Teams must have 2-5 members- single person teams will not be accepted. Every participant must register. For Microsoft's Data Privacy Notice please visit: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/privacy/data-privacy-notice#mainoverview All registrations from this event will be shared with our co-hosts Microsoft and NVIDIA

What’s one thing you’d make better about life in San Francisco? Join us the evening before Elastic{ON} SF for a night of building with Mistral. Pick something you care about, like your commute, your neighborhood, or your favorite small business, and turn an idea into a working prototype. The challenge: build something that makes life in SF better for someone who lives here. A few places to start: Getting around: Make transit updates easier to understand or help people explore the city without a car. Neighborhood businesses: Build tools that help local shops reach customers, translate information, or save time. Public spaces: Help people discover parks, recreation facilities, public art, and neighborhood history. Community: Connect neighbors with volunteer opportunities, local gatherings, or ways to help. City information: Make public data and city services easier to navigate. You can start with SF’s open datasets, including 311 reports, business locations, parks, street trees, and public art. Or bring a problem you’ve experienced firsthand. We’ll spend the evening building and finish with quick demos. Show us who your project helps, what it does, and how someone could use it. Engineers, designers, creative technologists, and people with firsthand knowledge of SF’s everyday challenges are welcome. Bring your laptop, your curiosity, and something you’d love to improve. The stack Mistral Mistral provides powerful and efficient models for building generative AI applications and agents. Elasticsearch Elasticsearch provides the search and retrieval layer, helping applications find and use relevant information through keyword, vector, and hybrid search. The challenge Challenge details coming soon. How it works 5:00 PM – Doors open Grab food and drinks, meet other attendees, and get settled. 5:15 PM – Kickoff and demo We’ll introduce the challenge, walk through the tools, and share the starter resources. 5:30 PM – Build time Choose an idea and start building. Mentors from M

Build a Sovereign AI Model Factory: Create an ML Engineer Agent that evaluates, fine-tunes, deploys, and improves open models using Union.ai on your cloud. YOU MUST RSVP ON LUMA: https://luma.com/uyo6mgp7 ​The best AI teams aren't renting every capability from an external API, they're building systems they own and control. In this hands-on session at the AWS Loft, we'll build exactly that. ​We'll start with a walkthrough where we build a LangGraph-powered agent that evaluates open models in parallel, fine-tunes promising candidates, deploys the winner, and retrains automatically when performance drops. Think of it as the first brick in your own model factory: a repeatable system for evaluating, improving, and deploying models you control, not a black box you call and hope for the best. ​Along the way, you'll see how Union.ai gives your workflows a durable runtime with infrastructure as context, so agents adapt infra resources, recover from failures, and keep moving without re-running completed work. And because it all runs in your own AWS account, you own the full stack end to end: your models, your data, your infrastructure, your IP. ​Then we switch into hack night mode: keep building on the example, bring your own models or datasets, experiment with evals and fine-tuning, extend open models to different parts of your agent, or start something new around the same ideas. ​For teams thinking about sovereign AI, this is a practical starting point for owning more of your stack, the weights, the training loop, the evals, and the infrastructure it runs on, all on AWS. ​Bring a laptop. Leave with a model factory.

Important Note: register on the external event website is required for admission Join us for an evening of deep technical dives and networking! This developer night explores the critical path of taking AI agents from concept to production on Azure. We will go beyond basic AI demos to tackle the real-world challenges of identity, strict data authorization, and observability using the combined power of Microsoft and Elastic. Who Should Attend: Software Developers, AI/ML Engineers, Cloud Architects, and Security Professionals interested in building secure, production-ready Generative AI applications on Azure. Agenda: \ 5:30pm\~6:00pm: Checkin, Food and Networking \ 6:00pm\~8:00pm: Tech talks, workshop and Q&A \ 8:00pm: Open discussion and Mixer Workshop: Ship Agents, Pass Risk Review: Microsoft Foundry + Elastic on Azure Speaker: Peter Laudati, Principal Partner Solution Architect at Microsoft Abstract: In this session, I’ll share how I built ELK Burgers, an agent-governance demo using Microsoft Foundry Hosted Agents and Elastic on Azure, and the lessons learned moving toward production readiness. Using synthetic contracts and operating manuals for a fictional restaurant chain, we’ll ask the same question of an intentionally over-permissioned assistant and four agents scoped for different jobs. Speakers/Topics: Stay tuned as we are updating more speakers and topics. If you have a keen interest in speaking to our community, we invite you to submit topics for consideration: Submit Topics Sponsors: We are actively seeking sponsors to support AI developers community. Whether it is by offering venue spaces, providing food, or cash sponsorship. Sponsors will not only speak at the meetups, receive prominent recognition, but also gain exposure to our extensive membership base of 50,000+ AI developers in San Francisco Bay Area and 500K+ worldwide.

Notion and Clover are bringing together security leaders for an afternoon at Notion HQ. AI has changed how software gets built, but most security teams have not changed nearly as fast. We’ll hear how Notion’s security team runs AI in production, then sit down with security leaders from Notion and Vercel to discuss what the security organization of the next few years could look like. Expect candid conversation, practical lessons, and a few strong opinions, followed by specialty cocktails, seasonal bites from local chefs, and time to connect. Designed for CISOs and security leaders. Space is limited and registration is subject to host approval. Agenda 4:00 PM | Doors open. Beverages and bites 4:30 PM | Vulnerability Factory: How Notion finds and fixes vulnerabilities at scale with AI A look at how Notion is using AI for vulnerability discovery, from alert investigation and AppSec to adversarial testing. We’ll share what is working, where the approach breaks down, and what we would do differently now. Jacob Brackett, Head of Application & Infrastructure Security 5:00 PM | The CISO panel: Designing the security organization for the AI era How are security teams changing as agents take on more work? A candid conversation on evolving roles, team structures, and the skills leaders will need to build the security organization of the future. David Tsao, CISO, Notion Talha Tariq, CTO Security, Vercel Melissa Bishop, CISO, Corporate Services at Amazon Nancy Wang, Head of Applied AI, OpenAI Moderated by Or Chen, Co-founder and CPO, Clover 5:40 PM - 7:00 PM | Beverages, bites, and time to connect with fellow security leaders