# Lukas Wesemann — AI Engineer Sydney 2026

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Canonical page: https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/speakers/lukas-wesemann/
Program status: The working timetable is public. Announced speakers and presentations are confirmed; some track assignments, session groupings and times may change as keynote, partner and specialist sessions are finalised. Morning keynote programmes and Industry sessions will be added as they are confirmed.

## Local AI and the End of the Cloud Default

- Track: Research / Deep Tech

Most AI today runs in the cloud, where every token costs money and every input leaves your device. Now AI agents are running around the clock with access to your email, files, and most sensitive data. That burns through tokens fast and sends your private data to someone else’s servers. This talk covers why frontier AI is moving on-device, the technical challenges of running large models on constrained hardware, and the cost and privacy advantages of local inference. It draws on Base Compute’s work building the on-device inference stack.

## Lukas Wesemann

Co-founder, CEO, Base Compute

Lukas is the co-founder and CEO of Base Compute, building the stack that makes frontier AI run locally on-device. Previously, he researched nanotechnology for high-speed computer vision at the University of Melbourne, helped train Australia's first LLMs (Matilda and Maincoder), and led Asia Pacific's first live agentic payment transaction in collaboration with Mastercard. Outside the lab, Lukas co-founded MLAI, Australia's largest AI startup community.

## Conference

- [Conference overview](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/index.md)
- [Agent guide](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/for-agents/)
- [llms.txt](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/llms.txt)