NEARCON SF Draws OpenAI and Google

- The event is an invite-only gathering for founders, researchers, and builders, requiring prospective attendees to apply. This curated approach differs from the previous NEARCON in 2023, which had around 3,000 to 5,000 participants. - A key speaker is NEAR Protocol co-founder Illia Polosukhin, who was also a co-author of the seminal 2017 Google research paper "Attention Is All You Need." This paper introduced the transformer architecture, which is the foundational technology behind models like ChatGPT. - The conference will feature speakers from other major tech companies, including Lukasz Kaiser from OpenAI and Kaushal Kurapati, Group Vice President for AI Agents at Oracle. - The organizer, NEAR Protocol, has a significant financial backing, having raised $350 million in a 2022 funding round that valued the company at $10 billion. In total, NEAR has raised over $542 million from investors such as Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global Management. - "Agentic commerce," a primary topic at the conference, refers to the use of autonomous AI agents that can act on behalf of a user or business to perform complex tasks like product research, negotiation, and purchasing. - The agenda includes sessions on "The Unified Commerce Layer for the Agentic Era" and "Autonomous Systems In Practice," with speakers like Google's Product Lead for Web3, Nalin Mittal. - The move of NEARCON to San Francisco from its previous location in Lisbon is a strategic decision to be at the center of the AI industry. - This event is part of a larger concentration of AI-focused gatherings in San Francisco, reflecting a growing trend in the city's tech landscape.