# Open, local & sovereign AI — AI Engineer Sydney 2026

> Choose where AI runs and who controls its foundations. These talks connect open protocol governance, open-weight models, on-device and distributed inference, model portability and sovereignty with practical cost and privacy decisions.

Canonical page: https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/topics/open-local-sovereign/
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.

## Published talks

- [Who Keeps It Open?](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/speakers/manik-surtani/) — Manik Surtani
  Every generational shift in computing produces plumbing that everyone depends on. TCP/IP, HTTP, the container runtime. And every time, there is a window where someone can quietly come to own it, and everyone else pays rent. The plumbing for AI agents is in that window right now. This talk is about why it matters. Why “open” is a present-tense word, decided…
- [Local AI and the End of the Cloud Default](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/speakers/lukas-wesemann/) — Lukas Wesemann
  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…
- [Skippy: The Little Inference Engine That CUDA](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/speakers/james-dumay/) — James Dumay & Daniel Winter-Wijntjes
  What happens under the hood when you run a large language model? This talk explores Skippy, a custom inference engine built for Mesh on top of llama.cpp, and the engineering behind local and distributed AI inference. We'll start with a practical primer on how inference works, then look at splitting large models across multiple computers, reusing work through…
- [Sovereignty Is an Inference Problem](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/speakers/leo-borges/) — Leo Borges
  AI sovereignty isn’t about where the GPUs sit. It’s about who can switch the intelligence off. Australia is spending billions on sovereign AI infrastructure. But onshore compute running models subject to another country’s export controls is still a dependency. Owning the building isn’t owning the model. Enterprises have the same blind spot. Running one…
- [Office-Brain and the Night Shift: What Happens When You Turn Off the Meter](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/speakers/mark-pesce/) — Mark Pesce
  "Good enough" AI now runs on a reasonably beefy laptop. Qwen3.8-27B benchmarks at an Intelligence Index of 52 - roughly the best money could buy back in February - and inferences happily on consumer kit. When tokens are minted on your own machines, the meter goes away, and a different way of working becomes economic: batch processing returns. I call it the…
- [Efficacy of Open-Weight Models for Coding and Design](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/speakers/joseph-gulay/) — Joseph Gulay
  
- [One harness for every coding agent: swap models and runtimes without rewriting](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/speakers/ananya-roy/) — Ananya Roy
  You want your team using the best coding agent for each job : Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or one you built yourself , without rewiring your setup every time a better model ships, and without each agent running loose with its own credentials, spend, and idea of what's safe. Across the thousands of engineering teams we work with globally, the pattern is the…

Topic groupings connect talks across the programme. For session times, rooms and tracks, see the [schedule](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/schedule/). Programme details remain subject to change.

- [Explore the whole programme](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/program/)
- [Conference overview](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/index.md)