Save the Date

Tuesday, September 16th - Wednesday, September 17th, 2025, A Virtual Conference

AI & the Age of Compute: GPU SuperClusters • 21st Century Steel & Infrastructure Economy

"The AI Accelerator: The Age of Compute"

Tuesday, September 16th, 2025

The Evening Keynote Roundtables

Opening Keynote Roundtable

8:00 PM - 8:50 PM: Eastern Time Zone

Session I:

The AI Accelerator in the Age of Compute

Is it the destination or is the essence of life always revealed in the journey. Was it Ralph Waldo Emerson or John Lennon most often attributed to that thought? Whoever the source, this thought most definitely contains a universal truth as it applies to the “March to AGI,” Artificial General Intelligence. While we may or may not ever reach AGI, the journey it has already spawned might already be called, “The Age of Compute.” We are witnessing a moment of monumental technology innovation, where “Hardware and Energy” are being harnessed to “Achieve a Higher Intelligence,” a state of inspiration and ingenuity, while not unique in history, certainly one worthy of exceptional importance.

"The “Age of Compute” Committees"

Exploring Content & Building Committees

Zoom Meetings Leading up to the September Event

I. Deep Dive: Committee One:

“Exploring AGI: The Human Mind + Artificial Intelligence”

II. Deep Dive: Committee Two:

"The Road to AGI: The Data Godzilla - Feeding the Monster”

III. Deep Dive: Committee Three:

Compute as Currency: GPUs, TPUs & Quantum Accelerators

Session II:

Global AI Competition: US – China – Asia Pacific - UK/EU - Middle East

No one country or global corporation will dominate the development of AI or the “March to AGI.” The task is too complex with too many unknowns and too many iterative odysseys to come. Nevertheless, aside from massive human perseverance, the journey to AGI, we can be certain will be the costliest of any technological challenge yet imagined. It is a “Poker Game” with “Table Stakes” beginning at $40 or $50 Billion. Once the global architecture of AGI is understood, the experiment and demands in LLMs, SLMs, Data Centers, Super Computers and advanced Electrical Power Generators will push the “Cost of Doing Business” into the Trillions of Dollars. Yes, there is a “Global Competition,” but it is not clear if there will ever be a winner.

9:00 PM - 9:50 PM: Eastern Time Zone

Session I:

21st Century Steel & Industrial Compute: Calculating Investment, Margins & Requirements

In this era of “Scale to Compute,” AI is the determinant that is driving the growth of “Industrial-Sized Supra-Data Centers,” physical plants to maintain a national and global “Artificial Intelligence Economy.”  How ironic it is that this industry must invent a “Hardware Revolution” to underpin an exponential explosion in software consumption. This is about “Generators” and “Batteries,” what a century ago might have been manufactured by “U.S. Steel,” in this era may be known as “21st Century Steel,” the invention of which is so expensive, that it will require an entirely “Unique Vision of Capital Engineering.” “Industrial Compute” is an entirely new understanding our national future.

Session II:

The Pathway to AGI: A Framework for Model Performance & Evaluation

The goalposts for the arrival of AGI always seems to be just beyond our reach. Much as Alan Turing believed that AGI might one day be attained, other brilliant scientists in each decade that has passed have have been more certain about the possibility of success. And with the breakthroughs of the past fifteen years, some believe it is near. But attaining AGI is allusive. Today, it is suggested that another investment of just one hundred or two hundred billion more might put us across the finish line. Perhaps in this our roundtable of “Computer & Cognitive Scientists,” “Neuroscientists, Mathematician & Physicists,” we might come to an additional understanding of our trajectory. If there is a barrier in achieving the ultimate “Intelligence of the Machine,” surely this evening’s discussion might provide a probative contribution.

Wednesday, September 17th, 2025

Noon - 12:45 PM - Eastern Time Zone

Session I:

Scaling to AGI: Chips & Generational Resolve - Barriers to Final Frontier AI Models

This is a conversation about the development of supercomputers, the development and training of LLMs and SLMs, about “Competing Chip Solutions,” a battleground of tech giants, “Novel Architectures,” about “Synthetic Data,” and the need for new “Specialized Scientific and Proprietary Data,” inputs of unique resources that might push the envelope of discovery. Is there a difference between the “AI Chip Wars,” energy demands, and the financial resources required to attain AGI and the “Illogical Dream” or “Hopeless Belief” in achieving the unattainable? We might address this quest as a question of “Generational Resolve” and perhaps that is appropriate. Each generation believes that its challenge is a “Final Frontier.” Today, global scientists and their financial sector partners are deeply committed to this purpose and perhaps they are correct.

Session II:

Financing Infrastructure Expansion: MegaFactories, Real Estate & Intelligent Hardware

As we approach “The Age of Compute,” a new word, a new reality has has entered the lexicon, namely the “MegaFactory.” MegaFactory is shorthand for a Chip/Server/Energy Manufacturing and Research facility of massive size, 1-5 Million Square Ft. (approximating 3 to 20 Football Fields), employing thousands of workers, engineers & scientists. Today we are only beginning to scratch the surface of addressing MegaPlants. The cost of construction and operation, an estimate, $5-20B per plant and in round numbers by 2035, the US will require 10-15 MegaFactories and the rest of the world about 35 or 40.  To put that in perspective, Meta has targeted $35B as its total AI investment over the next couple of years. In this session we will address the question of financing our AI future. There will likely emerge novel “Real Estate Debt Models” developed by Wall Street, Government Bond & assets as “The Chip Act” might indicate, Venture strategies and of course, massive financing by “Cash Rich & Visionary” global tech giants.

1:00 PM - 1:45 PM Eastern Time Zone

Session I:

The Industrial Energy Revolution: AI & the Compute Inversion - Exponential Increase in Consumption

The more power and hardware we throw at the problem, the “Greater the Performance Growth,” the march to AGI and “Massive Intelligence” becomes available and is created. That’s the good news. The bad news is “There has to be a better way.” “Intelligence and Hardware” doesn’t scale efficiently. The demands of electric power simply rise, the cost of which is astronomical. Thus, we can approach the challenge from two sides, “Increase Compute,” with enhanced or hopefully breakthrough “Fusion, Nuclear, Solar Technologies,” or taking the reverse tact, design novel computing paradigms, computing architectures such as quantum or neuromorphic computing. The challenge is to “Increase the “Compute Performance” of Supercomputers,” to rearrange the “Spaghetti Connections,” design a “Great Leap Forward” to the GPU bottleneck and turn them into “Gushers of Explosive Data Streams.”

Session II:

AI Adoption & Investment: Short Term Turbulence and Long-Term Transformation

The market is concentrated in “The Magnificent Seven.” On a daily basis, the temperature of our economic well-being is determined by this wildly-skewed and narrow barometer. And if we are to believe in “The Magnificent Seven,” we must believe that AI, that is the “March to AGI Artificial General Intelligence” is an accurate mirror of our future “Industrial Age.” With that in mind, and with a host of contrarian views plus the vagaries of minor issues such as wars, famines and petulance, it should not be surprising that “Betting on the Market,” can be unstable, even torturous. Nevertheless, life goes on. AI investments in the Billions continue, “Performance Breakthroughs” are declared and the blueprints of MegaFactories have barely dried.  Should this “Turbulent Present State of Affairs” flash as a giant question mark to our ultimate and successful arrival at AGI, which is hopefully a good thing?  Such details are among the hidden mysteries of our future.

2:00 PM - 2:45 PM Eastern Time Zone

Session I:

Compute as Currency: The Invaluable Resource – Re-definition of an Industrial Era

The “Internet Bubble” of 1997 to 2001 was a guaranteed certainty if one remembers the sound of the “Dial-Up Modem,” the “Telegraph” of its day. Luckily, “Ubiquitous Broadband” the currency of the “Internet Age,” saved the day, followed by WiFi and Mobile, “The Cloud,” and Big Data. We were cruising. And that brings us to the recent musings of Sam Altman, AI and his catchy reference to “Compute as the Currency” of AI development. With the impressive performance of AIs spitting out complex Code in seconds and “Minutes of Cinematic Imagery” magically appearing through "Prompts," it is difficult to disagree with the triumphant metaphor of “Hardware & Energy Meet Intelligence” as the outcome of AI. If raw processing power can manifest this magical journey to economic and creative growth, then “Compute” may indeed be the “Currency of our Age.”

Session II:

The Building Blocks of AI: Achieving New Levels of Benchmarks & Milestones

There has never been a shortage of overt competition or “Measuring Sticks” as they are applied to the tech industry. And a good indicator of an expected ROI in AI might be reflected in the “Investment in AI” numbers for 2023. And the results are not surprising. The three "Private Investment Chart Toppers" are $67.22B U.S.; $7.76B China and $3.78B UK. Since Google, Microsoft, Meta, NVIDIA, Amazon, OpenAI, Anthropic and AMD are all U.S. based, the numbers should not be surprising. And the most recent announcements of AI Benchmarks or Milestones in 2024 are more than impressive. Each debuted to overwhelming attention: OpenAI’s Sora Text to “Hollywood Quality” Video Generator, Google’s latest major update to Gemini AI with Multimodal reasoning or Analysis of Massive Documentation; NVIDIA’s Omniverse platform and its AI-powered robots and other autonomous systems or Amazon’s Partnership with Anthropic on the "Gen AI Alexa.” And perhaps the latest and greatest milestone to be reached in 2024 is Meta’s Open Source Llama 3.1 405B, that rivals the capabilities of proprietary models like GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

3:00 PM -3:45 PM Eastern Time Zone

Session I:

The AI Power Grid: The 21st Century Industrial Railroad –Solar-Nuclear-Fusion

In simple terms, a matter-of-fact “AI Search” takes ten times the electricity output as a regular Google search.  We might view this phenomenon in the context of an “AI/Energy Slide Rule” that exponentially attacks the “National Energy Grid” as a “Cascading Failure” might bring down the whole East Coast. The “AI Economy” is a consumption machine. It is estimated that one “AI MegaFactory” will require the entire output of a large nuclear reactor. Therefore just as the obsessive focus on a “March to AGI” continues, the “Tech Giants” of the world, along with their “Government, Financial & Scientific Partners” must contemplate a “Manhattan Project for Energy,” with a “Laser Focus” on next generation Solar, Nuclear and Fusion. An appropriate name might be "The AI Accelerator Energy Project.”

Session II:

Foundational AI Paradigms: Open-Source vs. Proprietary vs. Scalable and Modular Small Language Models (SLMs)

While the competition in “Foundation Models” rages forward, some arguing that it is a battle of “Magnificent Seven” superpowers and others positioning it as a “Race to the Economic Bottom and Commoditization,” as with most things, it’s not one or the other. And as the LLM wars advance forward, the “Middle or Specialized Market,” what otherwise might be called, Small Language Models (SLMs) is rapidly taking center stage and aggressively serving the demands of the “Marketplace.” And technology plays an active role in this conversation, with the introduction of “New and Unique” architectures, offering performance efficiencies, introducing “AI on the Device” with a host of specialized applications, reduced latency and less prone to hallucinations. Perhaps this progression might be best understood as the inevitable evolution of a “Robust and Emerging AI Industry.”

4:00 PM -4:45 PM Eastern Time Zone

Session I:

AI Advise & Consent: The Appropriate Points of Regulation & Intervention

While there is little dissent in the need for vigilance and regulation of AI, there is much hand-wringing and wrangling concerning the particulars and methodologies. For example, in the current AI legislation as outlined before the California Assembly, the “Artificial Intelligence Models Act,” among other things, require that a developer, before beginning to initially train a covered model, adhere to specific safety and security protocols. And developers would be required to retain third-party auditors to oversee compliance. Additionally, there will be specific protections for the “Hollywood Community,” with regard to creative rights, specifically, protection of images, voice and data produced by the film, tv and music industries. And that is only the beginning of the “AI Pandora’s Box” as questions of bias, privacy, deep fakes and manipulation of data and hallucinations take center stage.

The Evening Keynotes:

Our Theme: Arriving Soon: Next Level AI Creative Dimensions, Experiences & State of Mind

8:00 PM -8:50 PM Eastern Time Zone

Session I:

Are We There Yet? AGI: The Transformational Moment - Reaching the Ultra Human Experience

There is little doubt that the “Humanoid Experience” is fast approaching. Are we experiencing near-human encounters within the boundaries that are AI? Yes, certainly if we are discussing “voice,” inflection, nuance and emotion, vocal expression and poise. The latest demos from Google and OpenAI have been quite astonishing and impressive. But what about intelligence, reasoning and conversational ability? Clearly, Google and IBM have proven that an AI can surpass a “Human” in games of Chess and Go. However, in the realm of “General Intelligence,” “Emotional Intelligence,” “Social Intelligence,” close but no cigar, or are we closer than we think. In this session, we hope to take an "AI Intelligence Deep Dive". Are we approaching AGI and interaction with an “Ultra Human Being?” Perhaps we can explore that thought. 

Evening Keynote Roundtables

9:00 - 9:50 PM - Eastern Time Zone

Session I:

AI as Cinematic Creator: Discovering Alpha - Is Sixty Minutes of Synthetic Entertainment Art? 

Advancements in Cinematic AI have definitely captured the imagination. It’s not hard to extrapolate from a one minute or two-minute AI Generated “Runway” and ponder the idea of a fully realized “Synthetic AI Cinematic Experience.” Certainly, wholly imagined “Synthetic Characters” will arrive. In one form or another, they already have in commercials, Video Games and in films as well. After all, what was “Jessica Rabbit?” But a fully realized feature-length “Cinematic AI Experience?” The arrival of an “Intentional AI Film” will surely be controversial, but it will arrive. Perhaps the industry will create a “New Category” of “Synthesized Entertainment,” or it might simply find its way into the “General Entertainment Population.” In this session, we will explore such possibilities.