Welcome to the Underground
What this weekend is, how the room works, and what you should walk out with on Sunday. Short on purpose so we can get to the real thing.
Stephen DeLormeWHY ATTEND
LET'S BUILDTHE OPEN FUTURE OF AI.
August 15-16, 2026Atlanta, GAATL BitLab
Two days of talks and demos on putting AI to work in the real world: in your business, in your career, on hardware you own. You will learn practical ways to build with models and agents without locking yourself into someone else's proprietary platform. That is not just good engineering, it is how we get an AI future that belongs to everyone. Here is exactly what your ticket covers.
Selling now$300per ticket, both days
2 DAYS13 TALKS12 SPEAKERS1 ROOMALL AGESBYO LAPTOP
01
What your ticket gets you
ADMIT ONEBOTH DAYSFULL ACCESS
- 01
Every talk, both days
One badge covers the full two day program. Running local models, agents in production, private AI, training and fine tuning, funding for freedom tech. No tiers, no VIP area, no locked rooms.
- 02
Speakers you can corner
No green room, no speaker lounge. The lineup is in the room with you all weekend. Corner them over lunch, they came here to be cornered.
- 03
Lightning demos
Sunday afternoon is an open mic. Five minutes, your screen, something that runs. Watch, or sign up at the door and show the room what you've been working on.
- 04
Saturday happy hour
Day one winds down over drinks with the whole room. The talks are the excuse, this is the conference.
- 05
Coffee and lunch, both days
Morning coffee is going when doors open at 9 AM, and lunch is on us both days. Bring your laptop, claim a seat, get something running before the first talk.
- 06
A room that ships
Self hosters, OSS maintainers, and weekend hackers on all sides. The person next to you is half the value of the ticket. Show up stuck, leave unstuck.
02
The talks
Not a teaser reel. These sessions are already on the schedule with names attached, and every card links to the full write-up.
Saturday · 10:00 AM Stephen DeLormeSaturday · 10:30 AM Running Local Models: From Desktop to Data Center
You can run your first local model in about ten seconds. That is the easy part. The harder questions start immediately. How do you keep it private? How do you make it secure? How do you power an agent? What changes when one agent becomes ten, then a swarm? Austin walks through the full path from a first model on your laptop to a working inference cluster on hardware you control. Along the way, he covers the foundations of inference engineering: model choice, serving, runtimes, hardware, and the systems that let many agents run together. Come as a beginner or an experienced builder. Leave with a clear map of what to build next.
AustinSaturday · 11:15 AM How models get made: training and fine-tuning, end to end
Ben has been going deep on how models actually get trained, and this talk walks the whole process end to end: what pretraining does, where fine-tuning picks up, how the data and the hardware shape the result, and how the stages fit together into a model you can actually run. Less mystique, more mechanics. If a model has ever felt like a black box that arrives fully formed from somewhere else, this is the talk that takes the lid off.
Ben CarmanSaturday · 12:00 PM Freedom tech grants: how HRF backs the builders
Harrison leads freedom tech grants at the Human Rights Foundation, the program that funds open-source, privacy-preserving, censorship-resistant tools for human rights defenders around the world. He walks through how the program actually works: what HRF looks for, how projects get funded, and where the AI for Individual Rights program fits into supporting the kind of open model and open agent work this room is about. If you are building freedom tech and wondering how work like yours gets supported, this is the hour to find out. Come with questions about your own project.
Harrison FriedesSaturday · 2:00 PM Mimir: the agent that knows everything and spends nothing
Odin gave an eye for one drink from the well of wisdom. HODLBarbarian gave up cloud convenience instead, and got a personal agent that can see his entire financial life without any of it leaving the house. The problem is familiar: your money is scattered across a dozen institutions that each show you one slice, and every tool that offers to assemble the whole picture wants your credentials sitting on its servers. This talk is the architecture of the alternative. A local model, a sealed vault, a broker that hands out one credential at a time, and watch-only wallet descriptors, arranged so the agent can know everything and touch nothing. Mimir was a severed head: all counsel, no hands. That is a security model, not just a joke. The middle of the talk is the part nobody writes up, the approval economy. Every secret costs a tap, and a system that asks you fourteen times a night trains you to stop reading the prompts. He brings the failure log with him, including six denied nights in nine days where the guard was right every time, and a fix that turned out to be half a fix and broke again the same day. Then a live demo and the uncomfortable lessons, including an agent that recorded a security finding which never happened and how that fiction survived three review passes and became fact. You will leave knowing how to give an agent read access to things that matter without giving it the ability to move a single satoshi, and how to design approvals that people do not train themselves to ignore.
HODLBarbarianSaturday · 2:45 PM Agentic AI for developers
Adewale is an ambassador at the Agentic AI Foundation, where he helps agentic AI become understandable, credible, and usable for the developers who actually have to build with it. Expect a practical session on open agents and the developer experience around them. Exact talk details land once we lock them with the speaker.
Adewale AbatiSaturday · 3:30 PM LLM compression and self hosted inference
Sherif is an applied AI researcher at Sybil Solutions working on LLM compression and self hosted inference: the craft of getting capable models to run on hardware you actually own. Exact talk details land once we lock them with the speaker.
Sherif CherfaSunday · 10:00 AM Fireside: open AI for activists and human rights defenders
Alex builds private AI at Finite Computer, where the whole point is that using a model should not mean handing your data to somebody else. Harrison runs freedom tech grants at the Human Rights Foundation, funding the open source, privacy-preserving, censorship-resistant tools that human rights defenders actually depend on. They sit down together to talk about what happens where those two things meet: open models in the hands of activists, organizers, and defenders working under governments that would rather they had no tools at all. Where open AI is already doing real work, where it is still too fragile to trust with somebody's safety, and what the builders in this room could go and fix. Come with questions.
Alex LewinHarrison FriedesSunday · 11:00 AM Building at the intersection of AI and Bitcoin
Nitesh is the developer behind Hunk, an AI code review tool, and works on Noah, a Bitcoin Ark wallet. Expect a session from the intersection of AI and Bitcoin, with working code over roadmap theater. Exact talk details land once we lock them with the speaker.
Nitesh BSunday · 12:00 PM Proven correct: business logic with Lean and AI
Lean is a programming language for writing mathematical proofs, so instead of testing your software and hoping, you prove it correct. Matthias has been pairing Lean with AI to try exactly that on real business problems: building proofs for accountants, construction projects, and other domains where the books have to balance and the schedule has to hold. Come see what a theorem prover actually does and how AI changes the work of writing proofs, and leave motivated to write robust software that is mathematically proven to be correct.
Matthias DebernardiniSunday · 2:00 PM Confidential AI Beyond Inference
Running model inference inside a trusted execution environment can protect user data while it is being processed. But private inference is only one component of a confidential AI system. Anthony, co-founder and CTO of Maple, draws on several years of operating TEE-based AI infrastructure in production to explore what it takes to protect the larger system around inference, and where local execution complements confidential remote compute.
Anthony RonningSunday · 3:00 PM Designing payments for people and agents
UX and agent experience for agentic payments: making money move cleanly whether a person or an agent is holding the wallet, and what changes about design when your user might be a loop.
Stephen DeLormeSunday · 3:45 PM Buzz for startups
James is an Entrepreneur in Residence at ATDC, Georgia Tech's startup incubator, where he coaches a portfolio of tech-enabled founders. This session makes the case for Buzz, the platform from Block, as a place to actually run a startup: how a small team coordinates, ships, and works alongside agents in the open.
James Harris
03
The lineup
The people on the mic run real models in real rooms. Tap a face for the full bio.
Austin
PlebDevs
Nitesh B
Hunk
HODLBarbarian
HODLBarbarian Capital, LLC
Stephen DeLorme
moneydevkit
Matthias Debernardini
Nashville Automation
Sherif Cherfa
Sybil Solutions
Ben Carman
Spiral
Adewale Abati
Agentic AI Foundation
Harrison Friedes
Human Rights Foundation
Alex Lewin
Finite Computer
Anthony Ronning
Maple
James Harris
ATDC
04
What you leave with
- 01A local model running on your own machine before you leave the room
- 02An agent loop you understand line by line, not a black box
- 03Eval habits that tell you when you broke something
- 04A short list of open tools worth your weekend
- 05The names and handles of people building the same things you are
- 06Zero slide decks about artificial general intelligence
05
The math
Advance tickets are $200 until 7:00 AM ET on Saturday August 15. From then on it is $300 at the door. Waiting has a cost, and it is exactly this table.
IN ADVANCE$200Closed
AT THE DOOR$300Selling now
LAST CALL
CLAIM YOUR TICKET
Both days, every talk, the demos, the happy hour, the room. One badge covers all of it. Move early, pay less, bring your laptop.
Get your ticketALL AGES · BYO LAPTOP · DOORS 9AM