TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 will take place from October 13 to 15 at Moscone West in San Francisco. The event expects over 10,000 attendees, including founders, investors, and tech leaders, with more than 250 speakers and 300 exhibiting startups scheduled to participate across 200 sessions.
The conference agenda features discussions on AI infrastructure and model selection. Sessions will cover the trade-offs between frontier APIs and open-weight models, the integration of multiple models within a single product, and the impact of AI on hardware design, including chip optimization.
Industry experts, including representatives from CapitalG, Together AI, Pathway, Oumi, and Nvidia, will lead sessions on building AI startups. Topics include the decision-making process for deploying models, balancing costs and performance, and determining how much of the AI stack a company should own.
Additional sessions will explore the connection between AI architecture and hardware. Founders Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini of Ricursive Intelligence will discuss how AI is being used to design and optimize hardware, potentially accelerating the development of new infrastructure for future AI products.
