Cerebral Valley – Week of April 21st 🗓

The latest in AI Products, Events, and News

April 21, 2025

Register here for this weekend’s National Security Hackathon! Work on high impact problems with mission data and resources from our partners above.

Plus, register here for our flagship LlamaCon Hackathon on May 3-4 🦙

Looking to work at an AI company? Join the CV Talent Network here.

You Might’ve Missed

CV Spotlight: AWS Gen AI Lofts

AWS Gen AI Lofts are coming to 10+ cities worldwide in 2025. From San Francisco to São Paulo, Tel Aviv to Osaka, these pop-up spaces bring together local AI communities, technical experts, and founders to learn, connect, and build in the world of generative AI. The next destination is Dublin, Ireland from May 13-23. 

  1. Explore the latest in LLMs, Amazon Bedrock, and AI Agents

  2. Network with industry leaders and innovators

  3. Experience live demos of AI Applications across industries

  4. Get expert support for your AI implementation challenges

  5. Join the growing AI community in your city


Join AWS in Dublin on May 13-23, or find another location near you.

Events List

A curated list of upcoming AI events (view all events).

CV Events:

🗓️ Saturday, April 26th - Sunday, April 27th
📍 San Francisco, CA

Registration is now open for another weekend of building in support of national security at our second annual National Security Hackathon, in partnership with Stanford DEFCON and Shield Capital!

Hack on problems that matter – problem statements curated by US military stakeholders. Judges and mentors are from US government, startups, and venture capital firms. Full list of problem sets, judges, and mentors will be provided after registration.

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Register

🗓️ Saturday, May 3rd - Sunday, May 4th
📍 San Francisco, CA

We’re excited to welcome you to the LlamaCon Hackathon hosted by Meta in collaboration with Cerebral Valley and SHACK15!

This is a unique opportunity to build new AI apps on top of the newest Llama models, alongside the best hackers in AI. Meta's Llama team will be in attendance, and hackers will receive hands-on support from the Meta team.

Winning teams will receive cash, hardware, and credit prizes.

Our speakers and judges will be some of the top names in the industry, and we will be announcing them soon... stay tuned!

This is a fully in-person event - remote teams are not allowed.

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Register

Featured in April:

🗓️ Wednesday, April 23
📍 San Francisco, CA

​casual & small gathering for AI agent builders and founders... no talks, no pitches. Share what you're building, connect with peers, and unwind in good company

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Register

🗓️ Thursday, April 24
📍 San Francisco, CA

​​​​The current prevalence of GenAI has led to a seismic shift in app development. Now app users expect a fast engaging conversational experience, so developers are embracing AI and learning new techniques like prompt engineering to build it. The paradigms are changing, but one thing remains constant: to be effective, agentic apps require reliable, timely, secure data, so you need a database designed for AI to deliver them.

Join us for an exclusive meetup for AI developers, where speakers will discuss building RAG and agentic apps powered by fast, secure and accurate data.

Expect deep dive tech talks, live demos, and hands-on walk through, also the opportunity to network with fellow AI professionals.

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Register

🗓️ Monday, April 28
📍 San Francisco, CA

​​​​Join us for a meetup with Elastic, Red Hat, and AWS at the AWS Gen AI Loft on Monday, April 28th.

​We'll have exciting presentations from James Spiteri (Director of Product Management, Gen AI + ML - Security) and Sanjay Aiyagari (Chief Architect - Telco CTO Office at Red Hat), followed by networking, refreshments, and pizza.

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Register

🗓️ Tuesday, May 20- Wednesday, May 21
📍 San Francisco, CA

A conference where AI and creativity blend together is coming to San Francisco! From design, through filmmaking to music, the immersive stage at SFJazz will be taken over by the latest artistic possibilities and debates about expectations for the future developments. 

Join us for 2 days of insightful talks, hands-on workshops, and real conversations. Whether you're deep in AI or just curious about where it's all headed, this is the place to be. 

Our speakers include: John Maeda, Karin Fong, Leonardo De La Rocha, GMUNK and many more. 

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Register

🗓️ Thursday, June 5
📍 San Francisco, CA

Join thousands of data scientists, AI practitioners and developers at Snowflake’s Dev Day in San Francisco on June 5. 

This FREE in-person event offers you a packed agenda of industry experts; leading venture capitalists; demos from the most popular AI companies; a gen AI Bootcamp; and fun networking events.

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Register

This Week:

🗓️ Tuesday, April 22nd
📍 San Francisco, CA

​Join Cloudflare, Neon, Twilio and Fiberplane for an evening of fun, learning, and community. Together we will explore HONC (https://honc.dev/), an opinionated stack consisting of Hono, ORM (Drizzle), Neon, and Cloudflare Workers).

You can join the hacking challenges or just enjoy meeting other web developers. We invite developers, AI builders, startups, and anyone interested in technology to hang out, hack away, and learn together about new tools shaping the web development space.

🗓️ Tuesday, April 22nd
📍 San Francisco, CA

​​​As AI systems become increasingly complex and data-driven, the underlying infrastructure for search, retrieval, training, and analytics has emerged as a critical bottleneck. This talk explores the next generation of AI data lakes, presenting a comprehensive approach to managing large-scale, multimodal datasets that can dramatically accelerate machine learning workflows.

​Drawing from his extensive experience in working with the most cutting edge Gen AI companies, LanceDB’s CEO Cofounder Chang She will demonstrate how modern data infrastructure transforms AI development. The presentation will cover innovative techniques for efficient vector search, optimized training pipelines with dataset construction, and integrated analytics, showcasing real-world implementations from leading AI companies that highlight the potential of purpose-built data management solutions.

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Register

🗓️ Wednesday, April 23rd
📍 San Francisco, CA

Welcome to Martian Valley!

A theme party for the wildly curious, the slightly strange, and the beautifully bold.

Sometimes, being an entrepreneur feels like you're from a different planet — speaking your own language, and dreaming beyond Earth's limits. That’s why we’re bringing the vibe to life with a theme party at Shack15 on April 23rd called Martian Valley — a place where all the creative aliens gather.

The party is co-hosted by Shack15 and 888hz, an independent alternative investment collective from Brazil. Our party is also the official closing party of Brazil in Silicon Valley 2025, bringing together top entrepreneurs, innovators, and cosmic thinkers from across the Brazilian ecosystem.

Come celebrate the magic of standing out, dreaming big, and belonging exactly where you are!

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Register

🗓️ Thursday, April 24th
📍 San Francisco, CA

​​​​​MCP servers and A2A are opening a sea of possibilities for developer tools. They have the potential to make every developer a 10x engineer and allow SRE teams to reach six nines of reliability.

​What to Expect of the event:

  • ​Lightning Demos – real-time showcases of MCP servers, A2A and their tooling

  • ​Present and Future of Agent Communication Panel – Hear about MCP, A2A, and more from leading voices (Y-Combinator, Google Cloud, and a16z)

  • ​Networking & Community – Mingle with developers, founders, SREs, and AI advocates

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Register

Planning an upcoming event? Submit an event to our AI Event Feature.

Final Note…

You’ve reached the end of our weekly Cerebral Valley newsletter.

Sponsors: If you would like to promote a launch, event or hiring call to our community of AI founders, enterprises and investors, please get in touch at [email protected] or DM us on X.