Readers of AI Valley are pre-approved.

Most of the futures we get shown are the ones falling apart. The ruined city. The grim ending. The reason to brace.

That’s a failure of imagination, and an expensive one, because the future almost always arrives first as a story. Someone writes down the submarine, the video call, the trip to the moon, and decades later we build it.

So this year we put $5.5M behind the other kind of story, and behind the people building it. Two competitions, more than 30,000 people competing, and on September 25 the top five from each pitch live to the judges.

Optimism here is a decision, not a feeling. It’s the belief that problems are solvable, paired with the willingness to go solve them. Everyone in this room has already made it.

Award-winning filmmakers and directors. Creators with millions of followers, including Time100 honorees. Founders of public companies. NASA and SpaceX alumni. Novelists whose books engineers quote as design documents. A Forbes Top 50 Women in AI honoree. Investors writing checks into AI this quarter. The people who built the AI tools you used this week.

They’re flying in from 40+ countries. Most of them are building something you haven’t heard of yet. That’s the reason to come.