O'Reilly's pioneering unconference, back from hiatus.
FOO Camp is O'Reilly Media's invitation-only unconference. It has been on hiatus since the pandemic, but with everything happening in AI, Tim decided it was time to get the band back together. Roughly 180 people (developers, product leaders, researchers, technologists, founders, funders, policymakers, writers) showed up at Lighthaven, Berkeley for three days with no set agenda. Attendees built the session grid together on Friday night. It's designed to feel like the high-energy break between sessions at the world's best conferences: informal, peer-driven, everyone in the room a potential speaker.
This page is just our slice. Many other threads ran in parallel: the future of software development with AI, agent safety, new social structures and safety nets for a human-AI future, artist rights, employment modelling, and dozens more that would each deserve their own writeup. What follows is the strand we pursued.
Missing mechanisms, and why people show up for love, not money.
Tim opened by reminding the room why FOO Camp exists. People come because they're intrinsically interested, exploring things for love and not money. That is what creates the "hidden adjacencies": the moments when someone else in the room turns out to be working on the piece that connects to yours. Or, as Tim likes to say, new synapses in the global brain.
The thread he built out from there is one that has driven much of his recent work: the missing mechanisms of the AI economy. Every technological revolution depends on new economic mechanisms as much as new technical ones. The current AI race, framed as a handful of centralised providers everyone else calls into, is starting to fray. What would it take, he asked, to build a circulatory AI economy that returns value to human creators, rather than the extractive model that dominated AI's first phase?
A thread I kept returning to.
One question I kept coming back to across sessions was a version of Tim's opening in more specific form: if we want AI markets to be participatory rather than winner-takes-most, where should intelligence itself sit? My Day 2 lightning talk sketched out an answer: intelligence needs to be architecturally distributed, via specialised production and open protocols. I wrote out the full version of this talk and published it on Asimov's Addendum.
Why AI needs markets, and how specialised production and open protocols can enable this.
Ilan Strauss · June 27 lightning talk, expanded for Asimov's Addendum.
What comes out of Foo Camp is hidden adjacencies: the small aha moments when someone across the room turns out to be working on the piece that connects to yours. Structural change on the scale we discussed won't come together in one weekend at Lighthaven, but weekends like this are how a pattern starts. This page is a snapshot of one strand of ours; the rest of the weekend was busy on its own.
