O’Reilly to Host Fourth AI Codecon on Building with Open Source AI

Free Virtual Conference Explores How to Own, Inspect, and Run Models on Your Own Terms

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--O’Reilly, the premier learning platform for technology professionals, today announced the fourth virtual conference in the AI Codecon series. Building with Open Source AI will take place on Monday, August 31, 2026, from 11:00am to 3:00pm ET, and is free for all attendees.

Cohosted by O’Reilly Media founder and CEO Tim O’Reilly and AI engineering leader Addy Osmani (formerly director of AI at Google Cloud), the event arrives at a moment when the risks of building on closed models are no longer theoretical. A summer of surprise price hikes, deprecations, and vanishing access has made the case better than ever before that open weight models you can fine-tune, self-hosted stacks you fully control, and a fully open tooling ecosystem is a much more stable foundation to build on than any single vendor’s roadmap.

Key talks include:

• Fireside chat with Tim O’Reilly and Mozilla CTO Raffi Krikorian
• “Owning the Agentic Loop”—Angie Jones, VP of the Agentic AI Foundation
• “The Desktop Frontier”—Ahmad M. Osman, founder and CEO of Osmantic
• “Local Off-Loading: Beyond Tokenmaxxing and Tokenminning”—Gabe Goodhart, chief architect at IBM
• “Building an Adaptive LLM Router with Open Source”—Isha Chaturvedi, founding member of Keenable AI
• “Let the Workflow Decide: Routing Between Open and Closed Models”—Sunny Israni, cofounder and CTO of Lightswitch
• “Avoiding Prompt Debt: Let the Model Write the Prompts”—Drew Breunig, AI, data, and geo expert
• “Open Source AI Meets the State: What Builders Need to Know”—Mike Linksvayer, VP of developer policy at GitHub
• “Lessons Learned When Fable Disappeared”—Gene Kim, author, researcher, and IT Revolution founder
• “AI Potluck and the Open Source AI Gap Map”—Ayah Bdeir, CEO of current.ai

“The argument for open source AI is too often framed as a referendum on model weights,” said Tim O’Reilly. “That covers only a fraction of what actually makes open source AI matter. Open source won the web because the layer underneath your application was no longer a sealed product you rented from one company but something you could extend and build a business on top of without asking anyone's permission. The same will be true for AI.”

Conference attendees will see how open source AI has become a foundation that serious teams are building on. We’ll explore how the experts are choosing and adapting open models and other open source AI tools, and weighing the real trade-offs, such as cost, performance, transparency, and control. Whether attendees are evaluating their first open source AI deployment or are already running one at scale, they’ll come away with a clearer picture of where the open source AI ecosystem is headed and how to position themselves or their teams for it.

To see the full event schedule and reserve a spot, please click here.

For those interested in starting a free trial to access all available resources, visit https://www.oreilly.com/start-trial/.

About O’Reilly

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