With the rapid pace of AI advancement, the question is not if the next breakthrough will happen, but when and where. Last year, when we hosted our first AI Summit, the energy and excitement told us that New York City was poised to be a world hub for this emerging technology. On Tuesday, at our second AI summit, over 150 CEOs, founders, and cutting-edge researchers proved that New York’s AI scene is not just growing, but thriving. 

The summit convened leading entrepreneurs, academics, and policymakers–including a United States Senator, the Dean of West Point, and a retired four-star general. The group discussed a wide array of pressing topics and debates, from open source versus closed, the energy efficiency challenge, crafting responsible regulation, and the most promising new frontiers of AI, from biology and chemistry to robotics and 3-Dimensional image generation.

Lux partner Grace Isford kicked off the summit, pointing out that if New York is the city that never sleeps, right now AI is the most awake field in tech. “There have been 20 new unicorns in AI in 2023,” she said, “and 10 more in 2024 to date.” On CNBC the next day, Grace agreed with NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang that a new wave of AI was arriving.

The summit’s opening panel featured Lux’s Josh Wolfe in conversation with Senator Mark Warner, Chair of the Intelligence Committee. Senator Warner said if he had one goal with his committee post, it was to “redefine national security, not just in terms of tanks and guns and ships and planes, but also technology and competition.” He outlined the state of play of America’s strategic competition with China, addressed the need for responsible AI regulation to avoid “catastrophic harms,” and challenged the room to “be willing to partner with the government.” On this issue at least, the Senator argued, the divide wasn’t left or right but past versus future.

In the next panel, a fireside chat between Grace and Cris Valenzuela, CEO of Runway, opened with a stunning video demonstration: a little boy in a village cut to a lizard creature emerging from the water cut to a policeman playing the violin and on and on. The hyper-realistic imagery exhibited the leap Runway’s made with Gen3-Alpha. Cris explained how too many people mistake AI as merely a chatbot technology, not realizing that where we are now is just “a point in a curve” of generative capability. “Filmmaking is linked with the history of technology” he pointed out, and Runway’s tools are the next step. 

More wildly impressive demonstrations wowed the audience throughout the day. tldraw’s Steve Ruiz worked UI magic on the screen, showing how his product could manipulate and take direction from hand drawn content, like when he drew a bunch of squiggles and had the program graph them by squiggliness. 

Erik Bernhardsson, CEO of Modal, demonstrated how his AI infrastructure platform works–and also demonstrated the technical expertise of the audience by asking who in the room codes. Most people’s hands shot up. Roshan Rao, from Evolutionary Scale, actually folded proteins live on stage, Phonic did a demo that wowed everyone but remains in stealth, and Inductive Bio showed how their AI builds molecule models on the fly. Alex Wiltschko, CEO of Osmo, closed out the demos by showing the undertheorized potential of teaching computers how to smell. 

In a hotly anticipated discussion, Clem Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, talked to Lux’s Brandon Reeves about the fast pace of AI. “We're always encountering this challenge that I think all AI startups have of staying at the edge of technology,” he said. “The field is moving so fast that we feel like if we slow down for two months, we're basically going to be completely outdated and old fashioned.”

Another panel discussion featured Clem with Vipul Ved Prakash, CEO of Together AI and Brandon Duderstadt CEO of Nomic. Vipul argued, on the economics of data usage and large models, that while we need more power and data centers, “you start to realize what your yearly bill is going to be, and it just kind of makes sense to invest in [custom models] and make something more efficient.” Clem added that in the same way most people don’t need a private jet to get to work, most companies and clients don’t need a large model that’s prepared to tell you the meaning of life. 

Leading professors and researchers Danqi Chen from Princeton, He He from NYU’s CILVR Lab, Laurens van der Maaten from Meta, and Sasha Rush from Cornell Tech and Hugging Face engaged in a deeply technical discussion about the next frontiers in AI, and a group panel of Alex Rives CEO of Evolutionary Scale, Mohammed AlQuraishi of Columbia University, Rahul Satija of NYGC, NYU, and Neptune Bio, and Maruan Al-Shedivat of Genesis Therapeutics went deep on the promise and pitfalls of foundational biology as the next big AI breakthrough.

The summit ended with a bang when Lux’s Tony Thomas, former commander of United States Special Operations Command, talked to West Point’s Dean, Brigadier General Shane Reeves, about the intersection of AI and modern warfare. Reeves said that West Point’s theme for the year is the human and the machine for a simple reason: “If our officers are not AI enabled, we will lose.” 

Just about everyone in the room that day in downtown Manhattan probably agreed with that notion in their own line of work. From biology to chemistry to robotics to video generation, Lux Capital’s AI Summit evinced a need to enable more fields with AI, to keep turning sci-fi into sci-fact and the impossible into the inevitable.