Cerebral Valley – Week of May 11th 🗓

Our Google I/O Hackathon hits SF May 23rd with the DeepMind team. Plus, Hospitality 2030 lands at Rosewood Sand Hill May 16th — before we take over Paris with our Machina Hackathon...

May 11, 2026

Google's next chapter starts at I/O — come build it. Right after the keynote, we're hosting a Gemini hackathon with the Google DeepMind team focused on turning the latest model capabilities into working products. Direct access to the team behind Gemini, fresh APIs to play with, and the first weekend to ship on whatever lands at I/O.

📍 Saturday, May 23 | San Francisco, CA

What does a hotel look like in 2030? 

Join us at the iconic Rosewood Sand Hill for a 1-day hackathon bringing together the Bay Area’s top builders, designers, and founders to reimagine the future of hospitality with AI.

From intelligent concierge systems to fully autonomous operations, this is your chance to build the next generation of guest experiences - alongside leading partners including Anthropic, ElevenLabs, and Greycroft.

📍 Saturday, May 16 | Rosewood Sand Hill, Menlo Park

Physical AI is no longer a prediction.

Humanoids are on factory floors. Autonomous systems are operating at scale. The engineers building what comes next need a room to match.

In partnership with Cerebral Valley, 150+ builders will join us for 12 hours of intense building in 3 tracks, on July 6, 2026, in Paris, the day before the MACHINA Summit brings together the founders, scientists, and investors defining the next era of intelligent machines. Be part of the future of Physical AI. Applications are now open.

📍 Monday, July 6th | Paris, France

You Might’ve Missed

  • ~97% of your vector database is mathematically empty — @anirudhbv_ce (Sentra) drops a finding that's hard to unsee: only 91 of 3,072 dimensions in OpenAI's xtext-embedding-3-large do real work, and 80 of 3,072 in Gemini's gemini-embedding-001. The rest is mathematically empty. Hallucinations aren't a model problem — they're a geometry problem.

  • A LoRA trained on every UFO video the DoD released — @SHL0MS does the thing you didn't know you needed: trained a LoRA on the Department of War's full public UFO video archive. Automated by @s8n.

  • Inference is 100× cheaper. The compute bill went up anyway. — @demian_ai, who works on inference at @nebiustf, argues that the apparent contradiction here is actually the most important dynamic happening in AI right now. If you can hold both halves in your head at once, you understand where the money's going.

  • Fine-tuning a 450M VLM on satellite imagery — @paulabartabajo_ ships a step-by-step Liquid AI tutorial covering object detection, Q&A, and real-time captioning on a 450M-parameter vision-language model. Small-model satellite work, end-to-end.

  • uavs.fyi: a catalog of drone hardware — @osoraku_1997 launched uavs.fyi, a growing reference site mapping drone parts and configurations from around the world. More additions on the way.

  • Why GPT-3 had loss spikes: a subreddit of microwave noises — @gabriberton resurfaces a great training-data anecdote: GPT-3's mysterious loss spikes traced back to a scraped subreddit where every post was literally "mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm." Clean the data, the spikes disappear.

  • Ouster's Rev8 lidar — 2× range and resolution, plus RGB — @ousterlidar unveils Rev8, the next-gen OS digital lidar family. Built on Ouster L4 Silicon, it doubles the range and resolution of the platform and adds native Spatial Color (RGB). The new flagship OS1 Max pushes performance to 256 beams.

  • KV Cache, explained — @JayanthSanku01 publishes a deep-dive explainer on the KV cache — why it exists, how it grows with context, and the tradeoffs that drive most modern serving optimizations. Solid primer if you've been pattern-matching past the term in papers.

Every AI agent looks solid in the demo, then eventually breaks in production. Real users bring edge cases, strange workflows, and policy violations you never saw coming.

Push your agent into the Veris AI simulation sandbox. We spin up a realistic environment with simulated users, simulated enterprise tools (CRMs, ERPs, email, Slack, databases, or any API/MCP), and hundreds of auto-generated test scenarios spanning happy paths, edge cases, and adversarial attacks. Your agent runs through full multi-turn conversations as if it were live.

Every interaction is graded automatically. Every failure is traced to its root cause. You get a report showing exactly what broke and how to fix it.

Use the same environment for model training. Successful traces become supervised fine-tuning examples. Failed traces generate auto-labeled reward signals for Veris-managed RL.

Run hundreds of scenarios, find failure modes, fix them, generate training data, fine-tune, and re-run the same scenarios to verify improvement. One platform for self-improving agents.

We just launched Veris Plus with 500 free credits.

CV Spotlight: Snowflake Dev Day

Don't wait for the future—build it.

Calling all developers, AI/ML engineers, data scientists, analysts, data engineers and anyone building with AI!

Join your peers to explore demos of the latest data and AI technologies, hear from industry experts, earn professional badges, and much more. Learn, connect and play at Dev Day!

Don't miss your chance to:


Experience AI in Action - Get hands on with bootcamps, learn about the latest AI developments, and discover eLearning opportunities to turn your proof-of-concepts into enterprise-grade production.
Hear from Industry Trailblazers - Get inspiration from industry luminaries, community leaders, and your peers. Hear their stories and see their innovations to inspire your own!
Invest in Your Growth - Discover how AI is reshaping the developer toolkit and learn how to make it work for you. Explore new tools, pick up practical skills, and leave with ideas you'll actually use, whether it's for your next project or your next career move.

Open Jobs

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

iOS Engineer at AI Media Startup (SF)

- Building: Agentic media production platform, “Lovable for creatives”

- About: Well-funded preseed • Small but elite team of <5 • Founded by founder of Soundcloud and Dance • Founded raised $500m+ for previous companies

- Ideal candidate: Demonstrated experience building and maintaining SwiftUI in production & shipping impactful, high adoption mobile applications • 3+ years of experience in professional software engineering in an iOS/Mobile role • Hungry engineers willing to grind in-office with the team

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

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 May:

🗓️ Sat–Sun, May 16th–17th
📍 Notion HQ, San Francisco, CA

Join the Notion team for two days of building on their new Developer Platform. Build with primitives that let you sync any data source into Notion, give your agent any tool, and trigger workflows from anywhere. No servers, no infra — just a CLI and your ideas. Whether you've been building integrations for years or you're writing your first Worker, this hackathon is designed to get you shipping. Sponsored by Anthropic, OpenAI, and Vercel.

🗓️ Tuesday, May 12th
📍 AWS Builder Loft, San Francisco CA

​This is a curated evening for developers, technical founders, and startup operators who are ready to demo what they've shipped on Amazon Bedrock. Expect live demos, good energy, and conversation with the people actually building AI-powered products right now. Spots are limited.

🗓️ Thursday, May 14th
📍 San Francisco, CA

Customer expectations have never been higher, and AI continues to raise the bar. But many teams are stuck optimizing systems that were never built to deliver perfect customer experiences. Join leaders from Fin and Lightspeed Commerce on May 14th to see how the Customer Agent is closing that gap and making it possible to have a single system that knows your customer fully. You'll also get a first look at a groundbreaking new product from Fin that helps you deliver perfect customer experiences.

🗓️ May 12th–14th
📍 Mariott Marquis, San Francisco CA

AI Council is the IKYK technical conference for builders in AI. Hear from the co-inventor of ChatGPT. Creator of DuckDB. Creator of Codex. 1,500+ engineers. 10 tracks. Zero hype. Join teams from OpenAI, Anthropic, Snowflake, Databricks, Hugging Face, Vercel, and 100+ more.

Register

🗓️ Thursday, June 4th
📍 Shack15, San Francisco, CA

If you're building what's next, Observe is Arize AI’s annual conference for engineers building agents and AI systems in prod. This year, Observe will take place on June 4 at the San Francisco Ferry Building with engineers and teams from Uber, Cursor, OpenAI, AG2, and more offering perspectives on a defining challenge and opportunity ahead: defining agent feedback loops. Join the engineers, teams, and companies building smarter agents—and bring your laptop so you can join in and build together. Use code CEREBRALVALLEY100 for $100 off registration.

🗓️ Thursday, June 11th
📍 The Midway, San Francisco, CA

Vector Space Day comes to San Francisco on Thursday, June 11 at The Midway, gathering 300+ AI builders for a single-track day on agents and memory in production, retrieval from cloud to edge, context engineering, and multimodal AI. Speakers include mem0, LlamaIndex, Neo4j, Arize, Twelve Labs, and Qdrant, with a closing happy hour. Early bird tickets are $99 through May 11, then $199.

This Week in SF:

🗓️ May 12th–17th
📍 Various Locations, San Francisco, CA

We're kicking off The Summer Of Judgment!

To celebrate, we’re bringing an ice cream truck around SF and inviting startups, founders, and friends to stop by for free ice cream.

Register

🗓️ May 11th–15th
📍 1 Jones St, San Francisco, CA

​Where the people building human-centered AI meet.

​Five days. One city. Build the future we want to live in.
​Human+Tech Week convenes builders, operators, researchers, and investors working on applied AI across work, health, and cities. The emphasis is practical: turning ideas into systems that improve how people live, work, and thrive.

​If you’re building, funding, or implementing technology that advances human potential, this is the room.

Register

🗓️ Wednesday, May 13th
📍 AWS Builder Loft, San Francisco, CA

​2026 is already accelerating fast – new breakthroughs, new companies, and a city doubling down on its role as the global center of AI. This May, we’re bringing together the builders shaping what’s next with 8 hand-picked pre-Series A demos you won’t see anywhere else.

​Powered by The AI Collective – here's what's to expect:

​⚡️ 8 elite curated demos from the Bay's most visionary founders

​🎤 Live Q&A – challenge the builders in real time

​🧬 Interactive Demo Night App to connect, follow up, and join waitlists instantly

​🏆 Live community voting to crown the night’s champions and enshrine them in our Hall of Fame

🗓️ Wednesday, May 13th
📍 San Francisco, CA

​Vercel built AI Gateway so you can stop arguing about which model to use.

​On May 13, we're letting the builders decide.

​Here's how it works: pick a model, build something live, demo it to the crowd. The audience votes on the best demo. The winners walk the runway.

​Want to demo? Apply here. Tell us what you're planning to build and which model you're using. We'll select 8 demos ahead of time, and let you know if you’re selected before the event.

​Can't commit to demoing? Come build! There's an open hack session with a shared prompt and food and drinks all night.

​Brought to you by Vercel, Anthropic, MiniMax, and Kimi Moonshot.

​Limited spots. Bring your laptop.

Register

This Week in NYC:

🗓️ May 11th–17th
📍 New York, NY

​AI Week New York (Spring Edition) — May 11–17, 2026, organized by Pulse NYC, is a week-long, citywide tech festival featuring a dynamic series of community-led events, interactive workshops, panels, talks, and exclusive networking opportunities. It offers attendees a front-row seat to how artificial intelligence is transforming business, society, and everyday life.

Taking place across NYC, AI Week New York 2026 will bring together hundreds of tech leaders, innovators, and practitioners from government, startups, academia, and the broader tech ecosystem to explore the latest breakthroughs in AI, learn from one another, and drive responsible innovation forward — together.

🗓️ Wednesday, May 13th
📍 New York, NY

​apidays New York returns on May 13–14, 2026, bringing together 2,000+ engineers, architects, and digital leaders and 200+ speakers shaping the future of APIs and AI.

​This year’s theme, “The Execution Layer: Building APIs for the Agentic Era,” explores how APIs are evolving to power autonomous systems, AI agents, and real-time decision-making across enterprises.

​Expect insights and case studies from leading organizations including JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, U.S. Bank, Capital One, Morgan Stanley, Mastercard, Walmart, Macy’s, The New York Times, Disney, Netflix, Uber, LinkedIn, PepsiCo, Booking, and more.

🗓️ Saturday, May 16th
📍 Sanders Studios, Brooklyn, NY

​One day. Every frequency. Design × AI × Culture. 🎨◆🤖

​Presented by 241 Members, Vibescape, Visionbrew Interactive, Black Style Matters, and Sanders Studios, Future of NYC Design is an official NYCxDESIGN 2026 and NYC AI Week event bringing together 300+ designers, artists, founders, technologists, students, and cultural builders for one full day at Sanders Studios in Brooklyn. This is not a corporate conference. It is a community-curated gathering at the edge of what design can be in an AI-native world. Doors at 12 PM. Evening reception runs until 8 PM.

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, chat with our profile.