Panels
Four to five voices and a moderator, in an OpenStages room. Closed-door, no pitch slots.
A global AI dialogue between founders and Silicon Valley.
GIFTS is a recurring talk series from OpenStages — a continuing conversation between Silicon Valley and founders building everywhere else. Each edition brings investors, researchers, enterprise leaders, and startup builders into the same room, through panels, workshops, and online sessions.
Four sides of the same conversation.
Most AI panels put four versions of one perspective on stage. GIFTS is built the other way round — the value is in the disagreement.
01
Investors
The people deciding what gets funded, and why a market is ready or is not.
02
Researchers
The people deciding what is technically possible before it is a product.
03
Enterprise leaders
The people who have to run it in production, at a company that cannot break.
04
Startup builders
The founders turning all of the above into something people pay for.
Three ways it runs.
Workshops
Smaller and hands-on — a working session rather than a stage, in the room or online.
Online sessions
For the half of this conversation that is not in the Bay Area, and should still be in it.
Editions so far.
No. 01Sep 12, 2026Sunnyvale
The Future of AI Infrastructure — From scaling models to operating agents
A closing panel on power constraints, inference economics, GPU cluster reliability, enterprise security, agents, and where value accrues across the stack — investor, researcher, enterprise, and infrastructure perspectives in one conversation.
Ran inside AI Infra Signal, a room of 100.
Themes the series rotates through.
Subject areas, not a fixed calendar. As each one fills out it becomes its own night — and the open call below is how the next theme gets picked.
Infrastructure & compute
RanInference economics, GPU reliability, the data stack, and where value accrues across the layers.
Agents in production
What breaks when an agent leaves the demo — evaluation, reliability, and the cost of being wrong.
Enterprise adoption
Security, procurement, and the gap between a working pilot and a signed contract.
Building from everywhere
What founders outside the Valley are building, and what the Valley has not seen yet.
Models & training
Post-training, RL, open weights, and what a frontier result actually costs to reproduce.
Build this series with us.
OpenStages is looking for people who want to share their experience, lead a discussion, or help connect these communities. If that is you, talk to us — we would be glad to build GIFTS with you.
Speak
Share what you have actually learned building, investing, or running this in production. We look for a real point of view, not a track record of panels.
Partner
Host an edition, bring your community into it, or back a theme your company has a real stake in. We design and run the conversation end to end.
Join the conversation
Come to an edition, or help connect a community that should be in this dialogue and is not yet — especially outside the Bay Area.