Lukasz Kaiser, co-inventor of the Transformer, is stepping into the ring for the most gloriously nerdy showdown in SF: a live, tongue-in-cheek Transformers vs. Post-Transformers boxing match of ideas! Adrian Kosowski from Pathway will step into the ring on the post-transformer side, alongside Liquid AI’s CTO Mathias Lechner, and Llion Jones, CTO of Sakana AI, another co-inventor of Transformers!

This is the battle between innovations that shape trillion dollar markets - presented by their very authors (!).

The Wall Street Journal just predicted that 2026 is the year post-Transformers will rule AI. We're making that prediction a reality, and we want to do it in the most memorable way possible.

On May 5, we’re turning the future of AI into a fast-paced evening of punchy rounds, playful rebuttals, crowd-fueled energy, and a clapometer that decides who takes the title.

This is not another polite panel. It’s a must-attend night for anyone who wants to hear world-class researchers and builders debate what Transformers got spectacularly right, what’s starting to break at scale, and what might power the next era of AI, all in a format designed to be sharp, substantive, and fun.

Expect a curated room full of founders, researchers, AI influencers, and selected press, along with speakers from both the Transformer and post-Transformer corners. More names to be announced soon.

And yes, there will be excellent fuel for the night: food, drinks, cool music, team signs, and a charity prize purse for the winning side. Join us for an exclusive AI event that will feed your brain, your group chat, and your appetite all at once

Speakers:

🥊 Łukasz Kaiser is the co-inventor of the Transformer architecture and the co-author of the TensorFlow system, two foundational contributions to contemporary AI. He has worked as a researcher at OpenAI and Google Brain. He studies fundamental aspects of deep learning and has co-invented reasoning models (o1 and o3), ChatGPT, GPT-4, and GPT-5.
Before that, Lukasz was a tenured researcher at University Paris Diderot and worked on logic and automata theory. He received his PhD from RWTH Aachen and his MSc from University of Wroclaw.

🥊 Adrian Kosowski is the inventor of the Dragon Hatchling (BDH) architecture. Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of Pathway. A theoretical computer scientist, quantum physicist, and mathematician, Kosowski earned his PhD at just 20 years old and went on to serve as a tenured researcher at Inria at 23, and associate professor at École Polytechnique. He has authored more than 100 scientific papers spanning graph algorithms, distributed systems, quantum information, and artificial intelligence, and was an early pioneer of navigable small-world networks. He also co-founded SPOJ.com, the first large-scale online community for competitive programming. At Pathway, Kosowski is focused on uncovering the theoretical foundations of how intelligence emerges, shaping the company’s breakthrough brain-inspired AI architecture.

🥊 Mathias Lechner is the Co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of Liquid AI and a Research Affiliate at MIT CSAIL. He completed his PhD in Computer Science at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) supervised by Prof. Tom Henzinger. Mathias’s research focuses on developing robust and trustworthy machine learning models. He received multiple awards such as the 2023 Outstanding Scientific Achievement Award at the IST Austria for his work on proving safety in stochastic machine learning systems and Hyperion Research 2022 HPC Innovation Excellence Award for the work on Liquid neural networks.

🥊 Llion Jones is the co-inventor of the Transformer architecture that laid the foundation for modern AI. Currently, he is the CTO and co-founder of Sakana AI where he is defining the next generation of intelligent systems beyond the Transformer paradigm. Yes! Llion switched sides! Before co-founding Sakana AI, he spent more than eight years at Google working on machine intelligence and natural language understanding.

Moderators:

🥊 Dexter Horthy is founder and CEO of HumanLayer, building the human layer for AI agents. He is known for his work on context engineering and reliable agent design.
https://x.com/dexhorthy

🥊 Zuzanna Stamirowska is CEO of Pathway, co-author of Dragon Hatchling (BDH) architecture, and a Ph.D. in Complex Systems recognized among the “100 geniuses whose innovations could change the world" by magazine Le Point.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stamirowska/

This match is co-sponsored by AWS.

Transformers vs. Post-Transformers: The Deciding Round, with Lukasz Kaiser