
A mathematician turned repeat founder learned that the central challenge of industrial AI is not making a model smarter. It is giving engineers enough visibility, agency and evidence to let the model act.
Matthew Brown is the founder and CEO of ThoughtForge AI, a Berkeley robotics company building a cloud-based control platform that gives existing industrial robots real-time adaptivity and human-level dexterity using Active Inference, a biologically-inspired approach drawn from neuroscience. Over more than two decades in AI, he wrote combat logic for the Aegis system at Lockheed Martin, built the enemy intelligence behind game franchises like Halo, Bioshock, and Splinter Cell, and was the first engineer at Bonsai AI, where he helped ship one of the world's first production deep reinforcement learning platforms before Microsoft acquired it in 2018. He now teaches and sits on the board of the Active Institute while ThoughtForge works with manufacturers like bp, Siemens, and members of the ARM Institute to bring common sense to the factory floor.

Pieter Abbeel is one of the world's leading AI and robotics researchers, a professor at UC Berkeley, director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab, and co-founder of Covariant. His pioneering work in robot learning through apprenticeship learning and reinforcement learning has shaped modern robotics. His students have co-founded over a dozen AI companies including OpenAI, Perplexity, and Physical Intelligence. In 2024, he joined Amazon to lead frontier model research, and in December 2025 was appointed head of Amazon's LLM efforts within the AGI organization.