In 2026 the conferences worth your attention are the ones that answer three questions: where is the hardware going, what are attackers actually doing right now, and where are the hyperscalers taking the default infrastructure stack. The most useful sessions increasingly cut across all three. Most major US conferences offer virtual or on-demand passes at 40–50% of the in-person price; keynotes from AWS, Google, and Microsoft are typically free.

AI & Tech

In 2026, watch GTC for the inference scaling and edge deployment roadmap. Whatever NVIDIA announces there shows up in production tooling 12–18 months later. At Build, I/O, and DevDay, the signal is agent framework maturity: how much of the scaffolding developers are hand-rolling today is getting absorbed into the platform. The academic conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR) are a longer time horizon and the papers published there become commercial products in two to three years, worth tracking if you want to get ahead of the next capability wave. Note that their year links go to paper listing pages, not video playlists; recorded talks are on SlidesLive or each conference’s virtual portal.

Security

The sessions most worth your time in 2026 are about what AI is enabling on the offensive side: automated vulnerability discovery, LLM-driven social engineering at scale, and ML-based identity spoofing that bypasses static MFA. The Black Hat Arsenal track is the best early-warning signal showcasing open-source tools that will be repurposed against production systems. If you can’t attend in person, the On-Demand pass (~$1,300–$1,800) covers all recorded Briefings about a week post-event. DEF CON has a youtube playlist which is populated after the conference.

Engineering & Cloud

In 2026 the hyperscaler keynotes are where you calibrate your architecture assumptions, specifically what AWS Bedrock, Google Gemini integrations, and Azure AI are absorbing that developers currently build themselves. The security implications follow directly: whatever gets built into the platform becomes the new baseline that attackers target. The spring window (late April through late May) clusters Google Cloud Next, the SANS AI Summit, and KCD Toronto within roughly six weeks.

Canada

Toronto-accessible events where the value is physical attendance without international travel overhead. SecTor is the largest local conference for security professionals and a good place to learn about how the global threat landscape maps onto the Canadian companies. NorthSec is where you go to actually build offensive skills: the 2026 curriculum includes dedicated AI security training tracks covering practical attack and defense with ML. Video archives for Canadian events are inconsistent; check the channel links after each event.

I first caught the wave of excitement over the limited release of GPT3.5 (aka ChatGPT), a language model that was surprisingly good at generating text. Back then the use case was simple, I gave it ridiculous story premises to see what it could generate. I had a great time reading these stories with friends and we’d all laugh at how funny and interesting they were. I had very little foresight as to how much things would change. I thought it would be a short term beta, with limited release and invite only access. I had no sense of how permanent it would become.

Since then my usage of ChatGPT has evolved over time, influenced by the gradual improvement of the models, and the exploration of their limits. I love it for surfacing up new ideas, writing short code snippets, and exploring hypotheticals. The versatility of ChatGPT is what keeps me coming back to it as the go-to chatbot. As long as OpenAI keeps innovating on features that enhance the already powerful language model, I expect I will keep coming back to it for most of my needs.

Copilot

Copilot works great as a basic autocomplete to help bubble up related functions that I can choose to add in my project. For planning out a software project I use other language models with reasoning advanced functions.