Amazing speakers, even better networking opportunities. Will I see you there?

You can tell how hot robotics is getting by the number of events on the calendar, but you can tell who’s moving the needle by the quality of the event. I thought Actuate from Foxglove was a high water mark, but the new Long Horizon conference from Encord has got me just as excited. The focus is on robotics, physical AI and autonomous vehicles, so it’s covering the hard business of putting robots to work in live deployments.

The ultimate value of an event is in the networking opportunities, not just the information. That’s where the Encord team have assured me that they’ve built in lots of hallway conversation space, as the conference is now running across four stages.

I’m really excited to be attending both days of the summit, and am happy to say that I’ve been given an exclusive promo code to share with the community – use SVR35 at Long Horizon for 35% off all tickets. There are already six hundred high-profile registrations from companies including Skild, Wayve (including Chief Scientist, Jamie Shotton), Boston Dynamics, Bear Robotics (CEO and CTO), Mercedes-Benz, and others.

Event basics:

• Encord’s Long Horizon Physical AI Summit, October 20–21, Fort Mason Arts & Culture Center, San Francisco
• Two days, two distinct tracks: Day 1 is robotics and embodied AI, Day 2 is autonomy (AV, ADAS, drones, defense)
• Four stages running in parallel (Main Stage/Theatre, Horizon Stage, Frontier Stage, Vista Room breakout room) – incredible choice of what to see, not a single-track lecture day

Strong speaker list that’s still growing:

• Opening keynote Day 1: Deepak Pathak, CEO of Skild AI
• Opening fireside Day 2: Sebastian Thrun, Founder of Google X and Waymo, on “Autonomy, Anywhere”
• Alex Kendall, CEO of Wayve, keynoting Day 1
• Carolina Parada, VP and Head of Robotics at Google DeepMind, Ken Goldberg, and Alberto Rodriguez, Director of Robot Behavior for Atlas at Boston Dynamics, on humanoid motion and perception
• CEO of Applied Intuition, CTO of Shield AI, CTO of Amazon Robotics, Co-founder of Physical Intelligence, VP of AI at Waymo, CEO of General Intuition,
• Defense and drone autonomy represented by Saab, Firestorm, Forterra, Skydio, DoorDash, and Wing

Panels and debates:

• Data flywheels for real-world robot autonomy – CTO of Amazon Robotics in discussion with Chris Paxton (Agility Robotics) and Jason Ma (Dyna Robotics).
• Will world models eat Physical AI? – a debate between the CEO of Archetype AI (Ivan Poupyrev), the CEO of General Robotics (Ashish Kapoor), the CTO of Rhoda AI (Eric Chan) and the CEO of Dexterity (Samir Menon)
• From Assembly Line to Autonomous Line – four robotics CEOs (NoMagic, Standard Bots, Orangewood Labs, Bright Machines) on manufacturing automation
• Do Robots Need a GPT Moment? – large behavior models in the real world, with Rodney Brooks (Founder, iRobot) going head-to-head with Walden Robotics and Toyota Research Institute on the panel
• Scaling from 10 to 10,000 deployments – C-suite from the biggest autonomous trucking companies (Gatik, Kodiak, Torc and Bot Auto) will be having a candid discussion on stage about what it takes to scale.

Why Encord, why robotics now

• Encord builds data infrastructure for training and evaluating AI models on real-world, multimodal data
• We work with many large robotics companies, we want to plant the flagpole to say that physical AI has arrived by convening the top names in the industry for a candid series of discussions, debates, panels, keynotes and workshops.