medium-import

AI By the Bay 2025: Reliable Agentic AI

Alexy Khrabrov

Alexy Khrabrov

— 3 min read
Share

This November (11/17–19), AI By the Bay, the iconic independent developer conference, returns to the Temple of Data and AI in Oakland for the 11th year.

Image 2

Scale, Data and AI By the Bay, since 2013

It’s not just a conference, it’s a community of the best Bay Area meetups on distributed systems, data engineering, AI/ML at scale, DevOps/MLOps, AI product, and everything else that goes into building the systems and startups of tomorrow.

Over the years we’ve done many events By the Bay. We started with Scala in 2013, end quickly expanded to Scale in 2016. Data By the Bay 2016 was a five day event covering verticals such as healthcare, law, government with Data for Democracy, and AIoT — we’ve coined the term now used by Bosch and others, for applying AI to vast amounts of fast streaming data, that only grew exponentially since then.

The Rise of Deep Learning and ChatGPT, 2016–2023

The first AI By the Bay was held in 2017 with Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig of the Russell and Norvig fame on the panel and Stuart keynoting.

Image 3

Check out the photos from 2017. This is when attention in Deep Learning models was discussed at a roof party, and George Hotz held the audience attention revealing the secrets of AI and everything, Danny Shapiro laid out self-driving cars vision, Stuart Russell was the only one to worry about killer robots, and so many more paths were laid out that lead us to where we are today. A young startup founder, who was the member of the very first Obama internet team, talked about a startup, Brigade, for citizen democracy. He’s ran for Mayor of San Jose and won, and I came to his inauguration with my son. His name is Matt Mahan and he is a future Governor of California and then a President of the United States.

And now it is Peter’s turn! The first AI By the Bay came on the original wave of Deep Learning, that built the foundation for the rise of the LLMs. We also colocated the very first Self-Driving Cars conference and a learning AI conference then. The 2023, Scale By the Bay returned in person after ChatGPT was around for less than a year, and the world has changed already — AI was new and hallucinating the future. The themes of incredible disruption and danger have evolved and are present in the second AI By the Bay. What has changed? Agents. And Agentic systems are distributed systems we know and love best.

Onwards to Reliable Agentic AI, 2025

The key theme is Reliable Agentic AI. It links all three of our mainstay tracks:

  • Thoughtful Software Engineering
  • Cloud Architectures
  • Data and AI at Scale

— even more inextricably together.

To make the continuity clear, over the Summer 2025 we’ve convened the global leaders in these topics, some who keynoted and spoke By the Bay, to articulate the Reliable AI Manifesto. We are also sharing the Reliable Agentic AI Survey #1 — please answer it and add your name in the end if you agree with the manifesto, and we’ll have a community discussion around it.

There are four pillars and a dozen principles that herald the way to better, safer, maintainable, and observable AI systems. They concern developer experience, state of the art in distributed systems integrity, reliability and observability, programming, not just prompting LLMs, and more.

The conference builds upon these pillars across three days of workshops, talks, and the colocated hackathon, our first.

The tools we showcase include Agentic frameworks such as Akka, LangGraph and Pydantic, with the latter providing a de facto new type safe way to program with Python, the lingua franca of AI.

Over the next few weeks and days before the conference, I’ll guide you through the thought process that governed our program creation, the hackathon, workshops, and meetups comprising our community, projects, topics, people, and companies that are meeting By the Bay. Join us!

Read more