Menu Icon
Refresh Miami Logo
Search Icon
Sign Up Sign In

Tech Basel Miami AI Summit delivers a peek into the future and strategies to ride the wave

Nancy Dahlberg
Nancy Dahlberg
PinLinkedIn

By Nancy Dahlberg and Anayansy Hernandez

If this week’s Tech Basel Miami AI Summit is a barometer, interest  in all things artificial intelligence in South Florida is off the charts.

To be sure, the escalation of Miami’s AI community has been swift. In just a couple of years, Miami AI Hub grew from a small meetup group among friends to 5,000 members strong, the largest AI community in the state. It’s now part of eMerge Americas, and the Hub’s founder, Burhan Sebin, is eMerge’s Chief AI Officer. Sebin, CEO Melissa Medina and the eMerge team produced this week’s inaugural summit held at the Mayfair  in Coconut Grove, which attracted more than 400 attendees, including founders, investors, enterprise tech leaders across industries, and leaders from academia, government and the Miami tech community.

The all-day summit on Wednesday  was equal parts celebration – this is Miami after all – and a real learning and networking  opportunity as Miami and the state want to make sure they play a key role in the technological revolution ahead. “The connections formed at Tech Basel Miami AI Summit are laying the foundation for the next wave of breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and emerging technologies,” Sebin said. 

The summit promised to offer a forward-looking lens on where frontier AI is heading and how it will impact business, society, and the global economy. Speakers on the main stage included founders and executives from ARK Invest, Nvidia, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Hugging Face and others, along with startups in the trenches with Ai, and leaders  in defense tech and national security, enterprise healthcare,  and more. Tactical advice was shared through workshops, too.

 Let’s dig into a few of those on-stage conversations.

Open source vs. closed source: Why the strategy is shifting

Companies that lean into open source may gain an edge in the coming years. Hugging Face CEO and co-founder Clem Delangue and Leon Kuperman, CTO and co-founder of Miami-based Cast AI, [pictured above] argued that open source has evolved from a mere philosophy into a critical business strategy. Delangue warned that relying on proprietary APIs leaves companies vulnerable: “Not your model, not your business.” He drew a sharp parallel to the software industry, noting that just as a software company wouldn’t outsource its core code, modern businesses shouldn’t outsource their AI brains. “If you really want to be an AI company today, you have to build AI yourself,” asserted Delangue, a Miami resident.

Kuperman reinforced this by highlighting the geopolitical and economic necessity of open models. He noted that open source has provided us with great leaps and advances in model engineering, serving as a critical counterbalance to closed ecosystems where a few powerful organizations control the technology. Addressing security concerns, Delangue pushed back against the narrative that open source is dangerous. “Open source is actually safer than closed source because you have a lot of eyes on it,” he said.

They also touched on the looming “AI bubble,” which Delangue said may actually be a large language model bubble, describing the overheating of massive, expensive generalist models. The future, both agreed, lies in smaller, efficient, task-specific models that solve real business problems without costing billions. Delangue contrasted the waste of siloed development in the United States with more coordinated efforts in China, noting, “every gigawatt that they deploy for AI is actually much more efficient because they don’t build inside silos.”

 The consensus was clear: for businesses to survive the next phase of AI, they must own their models, manage their costs, and embrace the transparency of open source.

Scaling intelligence across enterprises

Rohit Patel, director of Meta Superintelligence Labs, and Vishal Ganeriwala, senior direct of Product Marketing for Nvidia [pictured above], discussed the challenges of scaling AI, including compute bottlenecks, and the need for integrated AI factories.

But as Miami residents, both see South Florida as a potential epicenter for artificial intelligence, robotics and frontier tech. Ganeriwala, has been in South Florida for a couple of decades and believes the region is an “amazing place for tech.”  It’s an epicenter for different cultures, and that leads to “diverse data sets, diverse languages and diverse ideas,”  he said. “I love the hustle here.” Add to that good talent flows from the universities, including the University of Florida.

 Every time you have a technological shift, there’s an opportunity for new geographic locations, and it takes talent and capital, Patel added. There’s already lots of capital coming into the Miami area and for talent, along with the good university system, “people want to be here, and that should help tremendously.”

Are we in an AI bubble? Is it getting too frothy? “How can this be a bubble when we are on that edge where, collectively as the tech industry, we’re  pushing the boundaries,” Gamerwala said. “ We are doing something as big as that was done as the in the late 1800s with electrification. It is upon us, this AI thing. You start building things with it, and you’ll see the power of it.”

Cathie Wood on innovating and investing in the decade ahead

Cathie Wood, founder and CEO of ARK Invest, and Miami Mayor Francis Suarez [pictured at the top of this story] engaged in a lively conversation about the challenges – with the big one being the massive competitive pressures from China – and opportunities helped by the Trump adminisration’s efforts to deregulate and support innovation.

She shared how the convergence of AI, Crispr gene editing, and single-cell sequencing technologies is already happening and will lead to cures for rare diseases. Prevention too: “Crispr’s next big project, we think, is lowering permanently bad cholesterol,” said Wood What’s more, early trials are showing positive results for the potential of AI diagnosing cancer in stage 1, maybe even pre-stage 1, She predicts this convergence of technologies could also dramatically collapse the time and costs of drug development.

Another interesting  convergence for Wood is robotics, energy storage and AI. “We think autonomous mobility will go from generating maybe a billion or so in revenue this year, and within five to 10 years, we see that moving to $8 to $10 trillion globally (includes China). I think most people are going to be astonished at how quickly this happens,” she said. “You can’t have silos. That’s not going to work anymore.”

“We are in the most important technology revolution of our lives,” said Wood, who relocated her company to St. Petersburg four years ago and is bullish on the state’’s potential to become a leading tech hub. As the conversation turned to the economy, she said she expects interest rates will come down, and “I think we’re going to be surprised at how low inflation goes next year.”  Oil prices are already down 20% year over year, and she thinks that could fall more as we go with more e;ectric transportation.

“If we’re right, what is about to happen is we’re moving from what has been during the last three years, a rolling recession. … into a rolling recovery,” Wood said. Noting that it’s never been easier to start building something, she added: “So what am I saying? Get out there innovating, just  go for it, because if you don’t, someone else will. This world is moving so quickly.”

Mayor Suarez said after his run as mayor ends in 13.5 days, he’ll be doing some of that vibe coding, too.

Redefining growth with Google    

Workshops throughout the day provided smaller groups with  practical, tactical advice and feedback from those in the trenches.  In one workshop, for instance, Google shared a formula for “10x thinking,” challenging attendees to abandon safety for radical leaps. David White [pictured above], field chief technology officer for Google Startups, explained that aiming for 10% growth results in doing the same things slightly better, whereas 10x thinking requires fundamentally rethinking the problem. White illustrated this distinction with travel: “If I want to fly from here to Tampa, I’m going to take an airplane, but it’s not going to get you to the moon.” Innovators must start with the moon and work backward, accepting that failures are often necessary stepping stones toward success.

A major theme of the session was shifting the proper use of artificial intelligence from a mere efficiency tool to a partner in problem-solving. White categorized AI’s utility into three buckets: tools that amplify human capability, creation that generates new assets via generative AI, and investigation for deep analysis. He urged founders to avoid “chasing the tool” and instead “fall in love with the problem”. Using Google as a case study, White noted they were the 23rd search engine to market, not the first. Success came from owning the entire problem of user friction, which included handling misspellings and poor phrasing, rather than expecting the user to be perfect. Today, startups should leverage tools like AI Studio for “vibe coding” to prototype fast. However, White cautioned that this speed comes with a cost; “you are racking up technical debt,” he said. “There will come a time when you have to pay that bill.”

The workshop concluded with a mental model for prioritization, which White referred to as “Tackle the Monkey.” He described a hypothetical project to get a monkey to recite Shakespeare on a pedestal. Most people rush to build the pedestal because it offers a false sense of progress, but “if you start with the pedestal, you’re never going to get a monkey to stand on it.” The lesson is to identify the most “impossible” aspect of the business and solve that first. By focusing on the hardest challenges and treating teams as partners rather than tools, startups can achieve the non-linear impact that defines 10x success.

Announcements and what’s ahead

As the conference came to a close, Mayor Suarez honored Manny Medina, serial entrepreneur and founder of eMerge Americas, with a Key to the City. “There isn’t anyone that’s more deserving of this than Manny Medina,” the mayor said. “I would have to live 10 lifetimes to pay back Miami for what it’s done for me and my family.” replied Medina when receiving the key. [Medina is pictured above leading a summit talk in the morning about the role of private capital and philanthropy.]

There were a few community announcements too, including one on a new initiative, the Florida AI Council, a statewide coalition built to accelerate artificial intelligence adoption, strengthen responsible innovation, and position Florida as a global hub for AI excellence. The council will include leaders from government, industry, academia, the startup ecosystem, and the investment community. 

Another announcement was the formation of Florida Quantum, which aims to organize, attract, and accelerate quantum innovation across Florida. The Florida Quantum initiative is co-led by Matt Cimaglia, founder & managing partner of Quantum Capital, and Tony Jimenez, managing partner of Medina Ventures. Partners include The Florida Alliance for Quantum Technology, eMerge Americas and FloridaCommerce.

The summit was a lead up to the eMerge Americas conference April 22-24, 2026, and is one of several initiatives and programs eMerge added this year, including the Gold Coast Accelerator and Miami AI School. The third announcement on Wednesday was that next year’s global conference + expo will grow with an additional hall at the Miami Beach Convention Center, as well as three days of programming, instead of two. A music concert will be held the evening of April 22nd that will benefit families of fallen shadow warriors, Melissa Medina said. Attendees also received a preview of the Deep Tech Summit that will be part of eMerge Americas 2026; more details are here.

Expect a return of Tech Basel Miami AI Summit next year, Sebin told Refresh Miami.

“Tech Basel Miami AI Summit delivered outstanding insights, real knowledge, high-quality connections, and unforgettable special moments. And we’re just getting started. We’ll build on this momentum, and next year will be on a whole new level.”

MORE SCENES FROM TECH BASEL MIAMI AI SUMMIT (all photos provided by eMerge Americas):

READ MORE IN REFRESH MIAMI:

Nancy Dahlberg
Latest posts by Nancy Dahlberg (see all)