tbd/con
september 23-24, 2026 / gather.town
the future of ai is tbd.
so is everything else.
a conference for people who have more questions than answers.
AI isn't arriving cleanly. neither should the conversation about it.
tbd/con is a virtual conference for people who have more questions than answers about AI. it's being put together by Joe Amditis, Jay Barchas-Lichtenstein, Patrick Boehler, Flavian DeLima, Matthew Gore-Kormanik, Yael Grauer, John Hernandez, Madison Karas, Scott Klein, Chad Kohalyk, David Kuszmar, Seamus Martin, Mariana Martinez Estens, Michel Sitruk, Ela Stapley, Shawn Terry, Lynn K Walsh, and Vannessa Wong.
researchers are probing model behavior. security practitioners are breaking systems. journalists are trying to explain what's happening, or figure out how to survive it as competition. policymakers are being asked to act on incomplete understanding. developers are shipping anyway. the result is a fragmented conversation about a technology that doesn't respect the boundaries it crosses.
tbd/con is an attempt to look at that, be surprised and confused and inspired. no keynotes from on high. no illusion of consensus. just practitioners across disciplines comparing notes and figuring out what to ask next.
if that sounds like your kind of room, take a look at the site and let us know how you want to be involved.
what's tbd
who ai actually serves
what it does to information ecosystems
whether safety and openness can coexist
how technologists, journalists, researchers, and hackers work together
what comes next
the sessions reflect that: talks that end with open questions. workshops where you build something and fail and learn from that. office hours to consult with someone from another domain. a midway where you wander into something you didn't expect.
circles
thought
systems architecture, ethics, epistemology, and philosophy centered on the emergent realities of synthetic and synthetic-human cognition.
information
utility, influence and the infrastructure of what we know and believe.
practice
the mechanics of building: architectures, data curation, and engineering at scale.
garage
wild prototypes, failed experiments, pet projects, adversarial AI and responsible disclosure, and the weird stuff that happens on the edges and the margins.
how it works
all virtual.
all on gather.town.
talks
unsolved theories
demos
raw prototypes
workshops
collaborative failure
panels
civil disagreement
office hours
expert critique
the midway
random encounters
when
september 23-24, 2026
where
gather.town
virtual campus. accessible anywhere.
access
free
no admission cost. donations go toward gather.town hosting and the domain.
want to be in the room?
two days, four circles, and a room of researchers, journalists, hackers, and builders comparing notes. free to attend, from anywhere.
what to expect
tbd/con is a virtual conference for people who have more questions than answers about AI. researchers, hackers, journalists, policy people, builders. people who rarely end up in the same room. we're trying to change that.
talks, demos, workshops, and panels across the four circles, plus the midway for the conversations that don't fit a session. come for one circle, wander into the others.
the circles
what the sessions are like
sessions that leave the room with a better question than it walked in with. technical depth, social critique, and wild prototypes all welcome.
- a real problem someone has not solved yet, not a finished success story
- specifics: what they built, what broke, what they would do differently
- something you can use, not a sales pitch
- time to argue with it afterward, not just listen
who comes
you don't need to have all the answers, or any of them. the room is practitioners, independent researchers, developers, community journalists, policy people, hackers, and people who've watched AI develop up close.