SAN FRANCISCO, May 07, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — 
The AGI Society has confirmed the keynote speakers and full speaker lineup for AGI-26, its 19th annual conference dedicated exclusively to Artificial General Intelligence, taking place July 27–30 in San Francisco.
The roster spans institutions at the forefront of machine intelligence research, from Google DeepMind and MIT to Tufts University and SingularityNET, and brings together researchers whose approaches to AGI differ as much as they overlap.
Confirmed for AGI-26: Karl Friston, whose neuroscience-inspired models have reshaped how researchers think about perception and inference; Gary Marcus, one of the field’s most prominent voices for symbolic and hybrid approaches; Michael Levin and Hananel Hazan, whose work on biological intelligence at Tufts is opening new questions about the substrate of cognition; Neil Gershenfeld (MIT); and Ben Goertzel, whose pursuit of general intelligence through SingularityNET and the ASI Alliance has defined much of the field’s ambition.
Also confirmed: Alexander Lerchner (Google DeepMind), Alison Gopnik (UC Berkeley), Alexander Ororbia (Rochester Institute of Technology), Faezeh Habibi (SingularityNET), Josef Urban (Czech Technical University in Prague), and Greg Meredith (F1R3FLY․io).
Neuroscience. Symbols. Agents. Hybrids. Every major school of thought, in one room.
The four-day program includes peer-reviewed paper presentations, software and hardware demonstrations, tutorials, and workshops, organized around three themes the AGI Society has built the conference series on: advancing the theoretical foundations of AGI, developing practical pathways from today’s narrow AI systems toward robust general intelligence, and addressing the societal and ethical implications of what comes next.
This year’s edition places particular weight on a question the field can no longer defer, how rapid advances in reasoning, adaptation, and generalization translate into systems that are accountable and beneficial over the long term, even as they leverage their general intelligence to overhaul their own foundations radically. The conference will also feature themed sessions on Neural-Symbolic and Hybrid Methods, Predictive Coding, Practical Proto-AGI Systems, and Active Inference for General Intelligence.
As conference series co-founder Ben Goertzel says, “There has never been such an exciting time to be working toward AGI. I have said this each year at the AGI conference for the last few years, and it keeps on being true. The rate of intellectual and practical progress toward AGI we are seeing is truly remarkable, if at times a bit dizzying. While serious AGI researchers understand that scaling LLMs will not get us to full human-level AGI, and research advances are still required, there is nonetheless a feeling across the field that accelerating progress will continue and major additional breakthroughs may be soon at hand. The AGI conference series remains the only venue gathering together AGI researchers and practitioners from across the spectrum of scientific and engineering approaches, from academia and industry and the open source community and from all around the globe.”
A dedicated Investor Day on July 30 will address the investment landscape and broader implications of general intelligence, running alongside the technical program.
Outstanding papers submitted to AGI-26 will be considered for several prizes: the Kurzweil Prize for Best AGI Idea ($1,250), the AGI Society Prize for Progress Toward AGI ($1,000), the Springer Prize for Best AGI Paper ($1,000), and the Hyperon Prize for Best Student Paper ($250).
Since its founding in 2008, the AGI Conference Series has welcomed over 1,000 researchers, practitioners, and thought leaders from academia, industry, and government. Past speakers include Jürgen Schmidhuber, Yoshua Bengio, Peter Norvig, Richard Sutton, Christof Koch, and François Chollet. The series has functioned less as a showcase and more as a pressure test, a place where foundational assumptions get challenged and the direction of the field gets shaped.
Link to tickets: https://luma.com/AGI-26
About AGI Society
The AGI Society is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the study and design of artificial general intelligence systems. The society facilitates global cooperation and communication to publicize knowledge and diverse views concerning the future of intelligence.
https://agi-conference.org/
Contact
SingularityNet Team
info@singularitynet.io
A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/0c116b70-81c9-4890-971c-54763f4f0734
