How Google DeepMind is researching the next Frontier of AI for Gemini — Raia Hadsell, VP of Research

Presenters Raia Hadsell Source AI Engineer Europe 2026 Beyond the Chatbot: Exploring the Frontier of Intelligence with Raia Hadsell 🚀 At the recent AI Engineer conference in London, Raia Hadsell, VP of Research at Google DeepMind, took the stage to remind us that the future of AI is much broader than just text boxes and chat interfaces. With a background spanning from the philosophy of religion to a PhD in convolutional neural networks under Yann LeCun, Hadsell now leads a massive team of 1,200 scientists and engineers across 10 global labs. ...

April 18, 2026 · 5 min

The Friction is Your Judgment — Armin Ronacher & Cristina Poncela Cubeiro, Earendil

Presenters Armin Ronacher Cristina Poncela Cubeiro Source AI Engineer Europe 2026 Embrace the Friction: Steering AI Agents in Software Development 🚀💡 “Ship without friction.” Sounds like a dream, doesn’t it? A smooth, unhindered path from idea to deployment. But what if that frictionless journey secretly leads to a cliff edge? That’s the intriguing question Armin Ronacher, a software development veteran with 20 years in the open-source space (and creator of the Python framework Flask!), and Cristina Poncela Cubeiro, a self-described “native AI engineer,” challenged us with. Their message is clear: in the age of AI agents, we need to add a little bit of friction back into our development process. ...

April 18, 2026 · 7 min

State of the Claw — Peter Steinberger

Presenters Peter Steinberger Source AI Engineer Europe 2026 🚀 The State of the Claw: Navigating the Future of Agentic AI 🤖 In just five months, OpenClaw has achieved what many thought impossible: it has become the fastest-growing open-source project in GitHub’s history. With nearly 30,000 commits, 2,000 contributors, and a trajectory that defies traditional growth charts, OpenClaw is redefining how we interact with personal AI agents. Peter Steinberger, the project’s creator and a recent addition to the OpenAI team, took the stage to discuss the “State of the Claw,” the challenges of hyper-growth, and why the future of AI belongs to the users. ...

April 17, 2026 · 4 min

Harness Engineering: How to Build Software When Humans Steer, Agents Execute — Ryan Lopopolo, OpenAI

Presenters Ryan Lopopolo Vibhu Sapra Source AI Engineer Europe 2026 Harness Engineering: Building Software with Humans Steering and Agents Executing 🚀 The world of software development is undergoing a seismic shift, and at the forefront of this revolution is Ryan Lopopolo, a Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI. For the past nine months, Ryan has been living and breathing a new paradigm: building software exclusively with agents. He’s a self-proclaimed “token billionaire,” not in the financial sense, but in his belief that everyone should have access to the power of AI models to accomplish complex tasks. ...

April 16, 2026 · 6 min

Building pi in a World of Slop — Mario Zechner

Presenters Mario Zechner Source AI Engineer Europe 2026 🚀 Beyond the Slop: Why I Built Pi and Why We Need to Slow Down Hey there, I’m Mario Zechner. Recently, I’ve been wearing a t-shirt covered in paid ad space to raise money for charity, but when I’m not being a human billboard, I’m thinking about the “tragedy” of modern AI development. We are currently living in a world of slop, and I’m here to tell you how I built Pi to escape it. ...

April 16, 2026 · 5 min