Model Routing
Nader Khalil, Walden Yan, Tanay Varshney, Alex Atallah
- When
- Thursday, July 23:45 PM – 4:05 PM · 20 min
- Where
- Track 4San Francisco, CA · imported from ai.engineer's public schedule feed
About this session
Model Routing explores how teams decide when to use local models, open-source models, or frontier cloud systems, and why the answer is increasingly hybrid rather than one-size-fits-all. The panel digs into routing architectures, model selection strategies, stack decisions, and what still needs to improve in local AI before more workloads can move closer to the user.
Moderator: Nader Khalil (NVIDIA). Panelists: Walden Yan (Cognition), Tanay Varshney (NVIDIA), Alex Atallah (OpenRouter).
Speakers (4)
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.
Co-founder & CPO, Cognition
Walden Yan is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Cognition, the AI lab behind Devin, the autonomous AI software engineer. He helped shape Devin from an early research project into a product now deployed across some of the world's largest enterprises. Before Cognition, Walden was a gold medalist for the United States at the International Olympiad in Informatics and studied Computer Science and Economics at Harvard.
Principal Engineer, NVIDIA
Tanay Varshney is a principal engineer at NVIDIA working on NeMotron models, NeMo Platform and LLM inference architecture at NVIDIA.
Co-founder & CEO, OpenRouter
Alex Atallah is Co-founder & CEO of OpenRouter. OpenRouter provides a unified interface for accessing and routing across hundreds of AI models from many providers.
More in Local AI
- State of the Union: Why Local, Why NowThursday, July 2 · 10:45 AM – 11:05 AM · Track 4
- 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
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
No key, no signup, CORS open. Everything here is generated from the same data the organisers edit.