Open Source AI Awards
Awards for the people of open-source AI — celebrating the projects, maintainers and contributors moving the field forward — followed by an evening of connecting with the people building open source AI.
When & Where
- Date: Friday, October 23, 2026 — awards night
- Time: 6:00 PM – 9:30 PM
- Format: Awards ceremony, then an evening of connecting with the community
- Where: Founders Inc. 2 Marina Blvd Building C Floor 3 (B300), San Francisco, CA 94123
Award Winners
Project Awards
- The Bedrock Award — Best AI Infrastructure
🏆 Winner: vLLM - The Reward Signal Award — Best Reinforcement Learning Project
🏆 Winner: Harbor - The Guardrails Award — Best Security & Alignment Project
🏆 Winner: NeMo Guardrails - The Reality Check Award — Best Benchmark or Evaluation Project
🏆 Winner: ExploitGym - The Mission Control Award — Best Agentic Harness
🏆 Winner: Hermes Agent - The Glass Box Award — Best Observability Tool
🏆 Winner: Arize Phoenix
Individual Awards
- The Community Lifeline Award — Outstanding Community Support
🏆 Winner: Daniel Han (Unsloth AI) - The Unsung Maintainer Award — Outstanding Project Stewardship
🏆 Winner: Quentin Gallouédec (Hugging Face) - The Open Knowledge Award — Outstanding Educator
🏆 Winner: Sebastian Raschka · LLMs from Scratch - The Naming Things Is Hard Award — Most Spectacularly Questionable Project Name
🏆 Winner: Claude Mem — now “CMEM”
Speakers
Come hear great talks and keynotes from the community, including:
Daniel HanUnsloth“The State of AI: Open and Closed Models”
Ahmad M. OsmanOsmantic“Local AI: Progress and Possibilities”
Matt WhiteOpen Intelligence Foundation, Columbia University“Open Intelligence”
Irene SolaimanHugging Face“The Hugging Face Incident: How an Open Model Defended Against A Closed Swarm”
Ian BallantyneGoogle DeepMind“Gemma: Dropping the Weights Is the Easy Part”
Lucas AtkinsArcee“The Open Paradox: What the future of open models might look like as models become more capable”
Alex NewmanClaude Mem“How to Succeed in Open Source AI: 0 to 100k Stars in One Year”Fireside Chat
Peter Walker (OpenRouter), in conversation with Basil Chatha (Latent Space).
Peter WalkerOpenRouter
Basil ChathaLatent Space






