Cerebral Valley – Week of April 6th 🗓

JetBrains and OpenAI bring Codex to the IDE at a two-day SF hackathon, plus AI events, news and open roles...

CVXIGAI Events 

You Might’ve Missed

  • TurboQuant on Blackwell B200 — @anirudhbv_ce implemented Google Research's TurboQuant as a CUDA-native compression engine on NVIDIA's Blackwell B200, achieving 5x KV cache compression on Qwen 2.5-1.5B with near-lossless attention scores. Built 5 custom cuTile CUDA kernels including fused attention with QJL corrections, online softmax, and pipelined TMA loads.

  • LLM trained on pre-1900 text rediscovers physics — @hla_michael trained an LLM from scratch exclusively on pre-1900 text to see if it could arrive at quantum mechanics and relativity. While too small for deep reasoning, the model showed glimpses of intuition — declaring that "light is made up of definite quantities of energy" and suggesting gravity and acceleration are locally equivalent. Dataset and models are open-sourced.

  • mlx-vlm v0.4.3 — @Prince_Canuma ships a major update to mlx-vlm with day-0 support for Gemma 4 (vision, audio, MoE) from DeepMind, Falcon-OCR and Falcon Perception from TII, and Granite Vision 4.0 from IBM Research. Also adds SAM 3.1 with Object Multiplex from Meta, RF-DETR from Roboflow, TurboQuant KV cache compression, and CUDA support for vision models.

  • Introducing Republic — @m_adams launches Republic, a tool for monitoring what's happening in your city. Tracks political news, crime, permits, events, and community groups across the city and at the neighborhood level.

  • EgoNav: humanoid navigation from human walking data — @KenWangWeizhuo presents EgoNav — 5 hours of a person walking around campus with cameras is all the training data needed. The result: a humanoid robot that navigates unseen buildings, crowds, and glass walls with zero robot data and zero finetuning. Behaviors like waiting for doors, steering around invisible glass walls, and yielding to pedestrians all emerged from the human walking prior.

  • OpenAI hiring SLAM engineers — @danfei_xu highlights that OpenAI is now hiring for SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) engineers — a signal that the company is pushing deeper into robotics and spatial intelligence.

  • AI-powered hedge fund — @nvonbodungen shares that he's been busy building Pentamerus, a hedge fund built entirely on AI.

Open Jobs

Looking to hire the best talent? Reach out to [email protected] for job placement inquiries.

Software Engineer at Computational Photography Startup (Remote)

- Building: Photo upscaling and generation for real estate & spatial photography

- About: Fully bootstrapped with >8 figures ARR • Small, distributed, tight-knit team • Solving cutting-edge problems in photography and spatial understanding • Processing thousands of pictures per day on industrial GPU infrastructure

- Ideal candidate: Experience does not matter, but demonstrated aptitude in game development or diffusion models are a huge plus • Clear communicators that value shipping > prestige • Repeat hackathon winners • Merging code into prod on day one

AI Product Engineer at Open-Source Web Company (NYC)

- Building: Open source web tools powering hundreds of millions of websites

- About: Series E company dedicated to an open web • Built foundational internet software including Wordpress & Jetpack • $800m+ raised • Now building out AI team

- Ideal candidate: Demonstrated knowledge building production AI systems with LLMs & agents • Experience in Typescript and Agents • Passion for open-source software and consumer products • Quick to adapt to new tools & development stack

Data Engineer at AI Presentation Automation Company (SF)

- Building: Presentation generation, creation, and automation software

- About: Series B unicorn • Profitable with >$100m ARR • $800m+ raised

- Ideal candidate: 4+ years experience in software and data engineering • Strong proficiency in Typescript, LLMs in development, and building AI agents • Senior engineer that can jump into new projects with no handholding

If you’re interested in the above roles, please email [email protected] with your LinkedIn, resume, and why you think you’re the best fit. We’ll be in touch if there’s a match.

Events List

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

Featured in March:

🗓️ Wednesday, April 15th
📍 Virtual (Free)

Seven and a half hours of live technical sessions and hands-on learning dedicated to the future of AI with knowledge graphs. Three tracks: Knowledge Graphs & GraphRAG, Graph Memory & Agents, and Graph + AI in Production. AI engineers will explore the latest techniques for context engineering, agentic systems, evals, MCP, and working with the latest models.

🗓️ April 18 at 9:00 AM - April 19 at 5:00 PM
📍 San Francisco, California

Unlock the power of Codex inside your IDE

We know IDEs must evolve with the tools. Let's hack together to build tooling to harness the next generation of development.

JetBrains is hosting a two-day hackathon in San Francisco, supported by OpenAI, to put Codex to work inside the IDE where your codebase lives. This isn’t a “toy project” weekend — this is about building real tools, real systems, and real workflows with AI embedded where you actually work.

Build developer tools, testing frameworks, refactoring pipelines, coding agents, and ship real value. Come with a team or find one on-site (a lot of people do)!

Register

🗓️ Monday April 20th
📍 Shack15, San Francisco, CA

Beltic x Shack15 host a private dinner on identity and trust in the agentic economy. Founders, investors, and enterprise leaders across AI, fintech, and infrastructure discuss how trust evolves as systems move from human-driven to agent-driven. Fireside speakers include Kevin Leffew (x402, Coinbase — an open protocol for autonomous agent payments over HTTP), Jørn Lyseggen (Founder at Shack15 and BKEY, 20 years in identity), and Dazza Greenwood (CodeX, Stanford Law & MIT — AI governance and accountability). Space limited, approval-based.

This Week in SF:

🗓️ Wednesday, April 8th 📍 Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA

Leaders from frontier AI research labs come together to explore "High-GDP Agents" — AI systems capable of reliably performing work tied to real economic output. Panel discussion on where agents produce significant value today, how to scale from one agent to a billion, and whether current benchmarks can predict real-world agentic GDP impact. Speakers include Andi Peng (Co-founder, humans&), Patrick Tammer (AI Strategy & Ops Lead, Google), Linda Lu (Responsible AI Researcher, Berkeley RDI), and Paco Guzmán (Head of Research, Handshake AI).

🗓️ Wednesday, April 8th 📍 The House by Edge & Node, San Francisco, CA

The closing celebration of Sentient's Arena Cohort 0 — three weeks of competition where top AI researchers and engineers developed frontier reasoning systems for Grounded Reasoning over Large Corpora. The top 10 projects demo their work on stage, followed by a workshop with Himanshu Tyagi (Co-Founder, Sentient) and a happy hour. Free and open to all AI founders and developers.

🗓️ Thursday, April 9th
📍 Pacific Heights, San Francisco, CA

The most ambitious founders showcase a month's worth of work at Lightyear's Demo Day. Incubated by HF0, the residency brings founders building at the boundaries of AI, robotics, neuroscience, and finance. 40% of teams broke $2M annualized revenue, one hit $10M ARR. One founder built a SOTA foundation model beating NVIDIA benchmarks. Doors at 4pm, demos at 4:30, founder meet & greet at 5.

This Week in NYC:

🗓️ Thursday, April 9th 📍 Midtown South, New York, NY (Courier Health HQ)

Deep-dive automation demos and community networking with 60 builders. Three speakers: Richard Emanuel (Streamline Connector) on scaling a Shopify automation agency with n8n, Pranav Kowadkar on multi-agent orchestration for an AI job search pipeline, and Arnaud Bieri (Courier Health) on running n8n in a HIPAA-compliant healthcare SaaS environment. Food, drinks, n8n swag. Space limited to 60.

🗓️ Thursday, April 9th 📍 East Village, New York, NY

A casual evening for OpenClaw users to share skills, agent configurations, and workflows. Hosted by Kaleb and Yi — an hour of show-and-tell where builders demo their setups and swap ideas. Bring your laptop, bring your configs, bring your curiosity.

🗓️ Sunday, April 12th 📍 Fordham Gabelli School of Business, New York, NY

A one-day hackathon focused on building practical tools that improve transparency, reliability, and safe use of AI systems. Powered by Lovable and Tavily, with IBM-led workshops, free credits, and judges from Intuit, J.P. Morgan Chase, and more. Teams of 4–5 prototype working solutions and demo live. Top prize: $1,000 + credits. Breakfast, lunch, and drinks provided.

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

Final Note…

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