Meet the people building frontier AI.
Workshops, dinners and salons hosted by IOSF since 2017, now in the Bay Area.
- Gatherings
- 28
- Cities
- 20
- People
- 12,000+
This season
A reception, talks, dinners and a workshop across the Bay Area, in date order.
Browse the gatheringsOne drawer, one gathering. Pull to explore.
This season’s rack. Each unit is a gathering, the newest at the top. Up and down arrows move between units, Enter pulls one out to read its tag, Escape pushes it home.
- 8 AugGenerational Conviction Summer Night92 guests
- 12 SepGo Through AI Bubble17 guests
- 20 SepInference Dinner8 guests
- 9 OctEfficient Reasoning at COLM 202611 speakers
- 9 OctEfficient Reasoning after party149 guests
- 20 OctCorp dev dinner8 guests
- NextTo be announced
Selected guests
A selection of the 12,000+ people who have joined IOSF gatherings since 2017.
Leads AI safety and security; UC Berkeley professor, MacArthur FellowDawn SongVP of AI Research, Meta Superintelligence Labs
Ex-Meta FAIR research director; led ELF OpenGoYuandong TianCo-founder, Recursive Superintelligence
ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable MentionJiajun WuAssistant Professor of CS, Stanford
Dissertation awards from ACM, ACL and AAAISewon MinAssistant Professor of EECS, UC Berkeley; Ai2
2025 ACL Fellow; founding director of Amazon-Illinois AICEHeng JiProfessor of CS, UIUC
NSF CAREER awardee; tensor methods for efficient AI trainingZheng ZhangProfessor of ECE, UC Santa Barbara
Led s1 test-time scaling; created the MTEB benchmarkNiklas MuennighoffResearcher; Stanford CS PhD student, Cursor
Sloan Fellow; IEEE 'AI's 10 to Watch' (2024)Kai-Wei ChangProfessor of CS, UCLA
Created Flash Linear Attention; first author of Gated DeltaNetSonglin YangMember of Technical Staff, Thinking Machines Lab
Co-created H2O, FlexGen and Deja Vu for cheaper LLM inferenceBeidi ChenAssistant Professor of ECE, CMU
CVPR 2024 Best Paper for Generative Image DynamicsZhengqi LiResearch Scientist, Google DeepMind
Building Hyperbolic, an open-access AI cloud and GPU marketplaceJasper ZhangCo-founder and CEO, Hyperbolic
Where our guests work
Teams represented by this season’s speakers, organizers and guests, as they list them. Participation is personal.
Companies
Alibaba
- Thinking Machines
Tesla
Cursor
Mercor
Xiaohongshu
OpusClip
Universities
- Princeton University
Tsinghua
Peking University
Ten years of rooms
One rack per era since 2017, one row per gathering. Each coral cable is an introduction made at an earlier event that came back this year.
Six racks in a row, one per era: five earlier racks from 2017 on the left, this season’s AI gatherings on the right. Each unit is a gathering. Each coral cable is an introduction made at an earlier event that came back this year. Arrow keys move between units and racks; Enter keeps a unit’s cables lit, Escape lets go.
- 2017 to 2019Fintech3 gatherings
- 2020 to 2021Open finance3 gatherings
- 2022 to 2023Open finance infrastructure5 gatherings
- 2023 to 2024Open finance and AI5 gatherings
- 2024 to 2025Open finance and consumer apps6 gatherings
- 2025 to 2026Frontier AI: research and compute6 gatherings
Introduction 1 of 12. Founder, payments infrastructure and Head of corp dev, AI compute company. Met at IOSG 4th Meetup, 2017. Again at Corp dev dinner, 2026.
- 2025 to 2026
Frontier AI: research and compute
For the people training models, running inference and building the silicon, in the Bay Area.
- Oct 2026Corp dev dinner8 guests
- Oct 2026Efficient Reasoning after party149 guests
- Oct 2026Efficient Reasoning at COLM 202611 speakers
- Sep 2026Inference Dinner8 guests
- Sep 2026Go Through AI Bubble17 guests
- Aug 2026Generational Conviction Summer Night92 guests
- 2024 to 2025
Open finance and consumer apps
A debate in Bangkok, co-hosted events in Hong Kong and Cannes, and 1,279 sign-ups in Seoul for a half day on super apps and payments.
- Dec 2025No guest count
- Sep 2025OFR 15th @Seoul: SuperApp EraNo guest count
- Jul 2025Pragma CannesNo guest count
- Jul 2025No guest count
- Feb 2025No guest count
- Nov 2024No guest count
- 2023 to 2024
Open finance and AI
The first AI-themed edition in Paris, then the largest gathering on record in Dubai: 3,353 sign-ups for a half day on AI and open finance converging.
- Sep 2024500 guests
- Sep 2024No guest count
- Apr 2024No guest count
- Mar 2024No guest count
- Jul 2023OFR Paris: Generative World Architecture1,000+ guests
- 2022 to 2023
Open finance infrastructure
The gatherings go global around industry conference weeks: Paris, Lisbon, Denver, Singapore and Istanbul, on data, security and infrastructure.
- Nov 2023No guest count
- Sep 2023No guest count
- Mar 2023No guest count
- Nov 2022No guest count
- Jul 2022No guest count
- 2020 to 2021
Open finance
A 1,000-person summit in Shanghai, the first online demo day for early founders, and two days in Shenzhen with 2,000+ on site.
- Dec 20212,000+ guests
- Oct 2021Kickstarter Demo Day: 1st Connection PartyNo guest count
- Oct 20201,000+ guests
- 2017 to 2019
Fintech
Where it started: small meetups in Tokyo and Shanghai on open finance and new platforms, growing into a 600-person evening in Shanghai.
- Sep 20196th Old Friends Reunion Meetup600+ guests
- 2018IOSG 5th Shanghai MeetupNo guest count
- 2017IOSG 4th MeetupNo guest count
About IOSF
IOSF invests in intelligence at the frontier from San Francisco. The team has invested together since 2017 and has backed more than 100 companies. Its focus is vertical AI adoption, AI and agent infrastructure, and physical AI. Beyond capital, IOSF connects founders with enterprise partners for commercial and data deals, and helps them hire across the U.S. and Asia.
iosf.vcStay on the list
Invites to dinners, talks and workshops go to this list first. For researchers and founders working at the frontier.
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Co-host an event with IOSF
For labs, startups and conferences. A dinner, a salon, or the evening after your workshop.
Ask what’s next
Get the upcoming calendar of dinners, talks and workshops in the Bay Area.