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
ONE TICKET.THE WHOLE SHOW.
August 15-16, 2026Atlanta, GAATL BitLab
You are not buying a seat at a keynote. You are getting two days inside a hackerspace with the people building open models, open agents, and freedom tech. Here is exactly what your ticket covers.
Selling now$200per ticket, both days
2 DAYS10 TALKS10 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 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 · 3:00 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 Running AI Privately
Private AI sounds simple until you try to build it. Alex walks through the challenges of creating an AI application that is completely private, end to end: keeping inference itself private by running it inside a trusted execution environment, keeping every message encrypted on the way in and out, and closing the gaps in between where your data usually leaks. If you want to use AI without handing your conversations to someone else, this is the map of what it actually takes.
Alex LewinSunday · 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 How to actually run an agent
Matthias builds managed Claude-based agent systems at Nashville Automation and keeps always-on, self-directed agents running in production. A practical session on orchestration, guardrails, and what breaks when agents run unattended. Exact talk details land once we lock them with the speaker.
Matthias DebernardiniSunday · 2:00 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 DeLorme
03
The lineup
The people on the mic run real models in real rooms. Tap a face for the full bio.
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
Tickets sell in waves. When a wave sells out, the next one opens at a higher price. Waiting has a cost, and it is exactly this table.
FIRST WAVE$200Selling now
SECOND WAVE$300Up next
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