State of the Union: Why Local, Why Now
Nader Khalil, Joseph Nelson, Alex Cheema, Ahmad Osman, Matthew Berman
- When
- Thursday, July 210:45 AM – 11:05 AM · 20 min
- Where
- Track 4San Francisco, CA · imported from ai.engineer's public schedule feed
About this session
Local AI has crossed from interesting to useful, driven by stronger open models, better hardware, and a maturing ecosystem for running intelligence outside the cloud. This panel explores what that shift unlocks for sovereignty, defense, regulated industries, privacy, cost, and resilience, and why open-source AI may be central to who benefits from the next wave of intelligence.
Moderator: Nader Khalil (NVIDIA). Panelists: Joseph Nelson (Roboflow), Alex Cheema (Exo Labs), Ahmad Osman (r/LocalLLaMA).
Speakers (5)
Director of Developer Technology, NVIDIA
Director of Developer Tech at NVIDIA leading Open Source, Agent Marketing, Developer Experience. CEO & co-founder of Brev.dev, which was acquired by NVIDIA in July 2024.
Cofounder, CEO, Roboflow
Joseph is cofounder/CEO at Roboflow, the vision AI company. Roboflow makes infrastructure millions of AI engineers including half the Fortune 100 use to create and deploy vision models in the cloud and on the edge. They are the authors of RF-DETR, SOTA realtime instance segmentation and detection transformers. Roboflow's backed by investors like YC, GV (fmr Google Ventures), Greg Brockman, Jeff Dean, amongst others.
CEO, EXO Labs
Alex Cheema is founder and CEO of Exo, focused on decentralized and local AI infrastructure.
Founder & CEO, Osmantic
Ahmad M. Osman is an AI researcher, systems engineer, and moderator of r/LocalLLaMA, where he helps a fast-growing community make local AI practical. A lifelong builder, he started coding at age 7, and by age 12 was running a private C++ MMORPG server from a Pentium 4 desktop. Today, Ahmad’s work sits at the intersection of LLMs, inference, hardware, infrastructure, and full-stack ownership. He holds dual degrees in Computer Science and Data Science, and is a prominent voice in modern AI infrastructure and self-hosted artificial intelligence. When not on stage, Ahmad can be found building Osmantic, his sovereign AI lab, where he serves as Founder and CEO.
Founder, Forward Future
More in Local AI
- State of the Union: Why Local, Why NowThursday, July 2 · 11:10 AM – 11:30 AM · Track 4
- Demo: GLM 5.2 on DGX Station — Frontier Intelligence Under Your DeskThursday, July 2 · 11:40 AM – 12:00 PM · Track 4
- Local AI DemosThursday, July 2 · 12:05 PM – 12:25 PM · Track 4
- Local Models: Trust, Control, OptimizationThursday, July 2 · 1:30 PM – 1:50 PM · Track 4
- Local Models: Trust, Control, OptimizationThursday, July 2 · 1:55 PM – 2:15 PM · Track 4
For developers: this programme is open data — JSON, iCal, schedule XML and an MCP endpoint.Show endpointsHide
- JSONEvery published session and speaker, in one request./aie-worldsfair-2026-import/feed.json
- iCalSubscribe in Google, Apple or Outlook Calendar./aie-worldsfair-2026-import/feed.ics
- Schedule XMLfrab / pentabarf — the format conference apps import./aie-worldsfair-2026-import/feed.xml
- MCP + RESTPoint Claude at the programme. OpenAPI 3.1 included./agents
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