CALLING ALL FOUNDERS - We Are READY for Tech Week
And more news, jobs, and members' perks!
NY AI Week and NY Tech Week
We’re heading into one of our busiest months of the year — AI Week NY in mid-May, then NY Tech Week in June. Here’s where to find us:
PMAI AI Demo: Founders Ask #AIWeekNY — May 14 A founder-first demo night during AI Week NY. Bring a working AI product, get five minutes of stage time, and field real questions from operators and other founders in the room. Apply to demo here!
If you are not sure about your product, book an office hour and we will figure it out together.
The PMAI #NYTechWeek Lineup — June 2 / 4 / 5 We’re running a full three-event series again during a16z’s NY Tech Week. Save these dates:
The Pioneer Track — May Cohort Starts May 8
Pioneer Track Cohort 1 kicked off on April 10. Cohort 2 starts May 8. Four Friday sessions — May 8, 15, 22, 29 — for builders ready to ship, not just study. If you’re moving from “I should learn AI” to “I should build the thing I keep talking about,” this is the program. Apply: pioneeringminds.ai/pioneer-track.
Discount is available for community members. Check the community channel.
Treats to Try
Wispr Flow 1.0 — Mac dictation that learns your writing style and auto-edits as you ramble.
Fathom 3.0 — bot-free meeting capture plus native ChatGPT and Claude MCP integrations.
Relizon AI — develops mobile apps, websites and AI agents for businesses.
OpenAI Symphony — open-source spec dropped April 28 that turns Linear into a control plane for Codex agents.
ElevenAgents Templates — pre-built voice agent templates with system prompts, workflows, and integrations baked in — stand up a customer support or sales voice agent in an afternoon instead of a sprint.
Browser Harness — by browser-use; instead of giving the LLM a rigid framework.
Hippo — biologically inspired memory for AI agents with decay, retrieval strengthening, and sleep consolidation.
PMAI Members’ Perks
Superlinear Academy — AI Builders + AI Architect PMAI has a Cooperative Co-Venture with Superlinear Academy (formerly AI Builders) — one of the strongest hands-on AI-builder programs we’ve found. PMAI members get:
Self-Paced Bundle (AI Builders + AI Architect) — $948 with code
PIONEERINGMINDSAI(save $100)Maven Cohort — $1,799 with code
PIONEERINGMINDSAI(save $200)Browse / start: go.ai-builders.com/pioneeringmindsai
Truth-in-marketing note: this is an external partner program. Per our co-venture agreement (campaign period 04/18/2026 – 10/31/2026), Superlinear Academy contributes 20% of Net Course Fees from eligible PMAI-driven enrollments to Pioneer AI Alliance Inc. (our 501(c)(3)), funding our Education Access program — tuition reimbursement for learners who can’t otherwise afford the seat. Your purchase compounds the community.
LiberNovo crafts professional ergonomic office chairs to upgrade daily comfort, correct sitting posture and maintain efficient creative flow. We also offer tailored enterprise procurement solutions for offices, ideal for equipping workspaces and improving employees’ daily sitting experience. Member’s discount here.
WeAreDevelopers World Congress — September 23-25, 2026 (San Jose) The world’s largest developer event — 10,000+ developers, 500+ speakers. Use code Community_PioneeringMinds for 10% off. Tickets: wearedevelopers.us.
AI Weekly Updates
Four reads that mattered most in the past two weeks:
Claude Opus 4.7 — Anthropic’s new flagship for agentic coding (Apr 16) — Notable gains on hard SWE tasks, longer-running agent reliability, and 3x higher-resolution image input. Powers Claude Design and the new Claude Code workflows.
DeepSeek V4 Preview — open-weights frontier at one-eighth the price (Apr 24) — V4 Pro is a 1.6T-param MoE (49B active) with 1M context, MIT-licensed open weights, and $1.74/$3.48 per 1M I/O tokens. The price floor for any team currently spending $30 per million output tokens just dropped 8x.
“LLMs Get Lost In Multi-Turn Conversation” (ICLR 2026 Outstanding Paper, Apr 23) — 200,000+ simulated conversations across six tasks show ~39% accuracy drop and 112% reliability collapse when prompts are split across turns vs. one-shot. Once a model takes a wrong turn, it doesn’t recover. Required reading if you’re building agents with multi-turn flows.
Anthropic — “What 81,000 people told us about the economics of AI” (Apr 22) — Workers in highest-exposure occupations report the most productivity gains AND the most displacement anxiety; biggest gains accrue to top and bottom paid roles, mostly via scope expansion. High-signal data for any founder thinking about pricing, hiring, or product positioning.
Education Resources — From Our Library
The technical companion we published last month walks through the implementation side: harness engineering, traffic-light mechanisms, and the open-source tools that make agent-first workflows actually reliable. Free, no signup.
→ Harness Engineering: A Technical Reference — when the agent is the entry point, the harness is the road.
For the full reading list and our community resources, visit pioneeringminds.ai.
AI Deals to Watch
Anthropic, the Claude maker, reportedly is fielding offers for a new ~$50B round at a $900B valuation that would surpass OpenAI as the world’s most valuable AI startup.
David Silver’s Ineffable Intelligence, a London reinforcement-learning AI lab building a “superlearner” that learns without human data, raised its $1.1B seed at a $5.1B valuation — Europe’s largest seed round ever.
VAST Data, a NYC-based AI Operating System unifying data, compute, and real-time processing for AI workloads, raised its $500M Series F co-led by Drive Capital and Access Industries.
Rogo, a NYC agentic AI platform for investment banking already used daily by 35,000+ bankers at firms like Lazard, Jefferies, and Moelis, raised its $160M Series D led by Kleiner Perkins.
Factory, an AI coding agent platform for enterprise engineering teams, raised its $150M Series C at a $1.5B valuation led by Khosla Ventures.
NeoCognition, a California AI research lab building agents that learn through environment-specific “world models” rather than retraining, raised its $40M seed.
May 2026 NYC AI Events
🤖 Application
May 4: AI Pitch Blitz: $1K Cash Drop — Fabrik NYC, 12-16 Vestry St. Free.
May 6: Trust at Scale: Who Owns the Facts in the AI Era? — NYU Stern. Free.
May 6: Ditch the Deck NYC — AI Show not Tell — NYC. Free (approval required).
May 13: AI Tinkerers NYC Demo Day — Adaptive Software with Sky Valley & Veris — NYC. Free.
🛠️ Deep Dives
May 3: AG2 Hackathon @ Fordham Gabelli — Fordham Gabelli. Free.
May 8: GenAI for Operational Decision-making — Columbia Business School. $25 students / $50 non-students.
May 11: Building Real-Time Video Agents with VAST Data Engine — New York Stock Exchange. Free (approval required).
May 11-12: Software Factory Intensive — Two-Day Workshop — NYC. Paid.
🎭 Networking & Social
May 5: NYC Founders & Operators Mixer — Harvard Club. Free (approval required).
May 14: Cornell Tech Spring 2026 Startup Awards + Open Studio — Cornell Tech, Roosevelt Island. Free.
🏛️ Summits & Conferences
May 4-5: AI Agent Conference 2026 — NY Hilton Midtown. Paid (community codes BOND-AI-25 / BONDAI_PC30).
May 21: Sana AI Summit New York 2026 — New York Public Library. Application-only.
May 27: Cornell Tech Frontiers of AI Summit 2026 — Verizon Center, Cornell Tech. $250 (academic discounts).
🌐 Virtual / Hybrid (East Coast Friendly)
May 6: Toward Energy-Optimal AI (MIT CSAIL) — Free.
May 13: Anthropic — How Warp Builds Self-Improving Agents on Claude — Free.
May 13: The Right Prediction at the Right Time — Free.
📌 Coming Up — June 2026
Jun 1-7 — NY Tech Week (a16z) — 300+ events citywide.
Jun 2 / 4 / 5 — PMAI #NYTechWeek lineup (Matchmaking Night / GTM Workshop / The Demo) — details soon, save the dates.
Jun 4 — AIAI New York: Generative AI + Agentic AI + CAIO + CISO Summits @ Convene 360 Madison.
Jun 17 — AWS Summit NYC 2026 @ Javits — agentic AI + serverless + AI security.
Job Opportunities
⭐ Featured — From Our Network
Three teams in our network reached out this month asking us to surface roles directly to PMAI builders. If you’re a fit, mention Pioneering Minds AI in your application — it helps both you and us :)
Applied AI Engineer at Model ML — Manhattan, NYC. Own AI agent infrastructure (multi-agent systems, RAG pipelines, evals) at the FinTech that just closed the largest UK fintech Series A in history ($75M, Y Combinator-backed three times over). Reports directly to founders. £200k–£300k + ~$160k equity. 5+ years SWE, Python + production AI background. Contact Kate McDermott, Director of Data & AI at Omnis Partners — Kate.McDermott@omnis.partners.
Staff Applied AI Engineer (Pre-Sales) at Snorkel.ai — NYC (Flatiron, hybrid). Stanford-born, research-led data-centric AI platform deployed across enterprise + federal. Lead technical discovery, design GenAI solution architectures, build bespoke demos (RAG, fine-tuning, agentic systems), author SOWs. Sits at the intersection of engineering, product, and commercial impact. $190k–$300k OTE + equity, ~25% travel. Contact Kate McDermott — Kate.McDermott@omnis.partners.
Multiple Staff / Senior Software Engineer roles at Harmonic.ai — NYC. The startup database used by Accel, YC, NEA, GV to find world-changing companies before they’re discovered. Currently hiring across infra, full-stack, iOS, and frontend:
Staff Software Engineer — NYC
Also: Lead Product Designer, Growth Lead, Account Manager, Solutions Engineer (New Grad ‘26), Account Executive, Growth Analyst
Other Roles in Our Orbit
10 currently-open AI/ML roles in NYC (or NYC-eligible) we’d actually apply to:
AI Engineer, Synthetic Research Agents at Aaru — NYC / Remote. Build LLM agents that simulate human behavior at the $1B-valued startup whose synthetic populations already serve Accenture, EY, and top political campaigns.
Senior Software Engineer (Full Stack) at EliseAI — NYC. Just raised a $250M Series E (a16z) — build AI agents that automate housing and healthcare workflows ($230K–$270K).
Software Engineer, AI/ML at Tabs — NYC (Manhattan, in-person). Own AI/ML features end-to-end on the AI-native finance platform powering Cursor and Statsig ($165K–$225K).
Backend Engineer, Agents at Hebbia — NYC (SoHo). Build agentic systems for the AI platform trusted by BlackRock, KKR, and 40% of the world’s largest asset managers ($160K–$300K).
Software Engineer, Core Services at Cursor (Anysphere) — NYC / SF. Own auth, webhooks, and the agent-workflow backend powering one of the most-used AI dev tools in the world.
Product Enablement Manager at OpenAI — NYC / SF (3x/week). Translate rapidly evolving APIs into field-ready playbooks ($177K–$196K + equity).
Senior Product Manager, Education Labs at Anthropic — NYC / SF. Shape Claude’s education product surface ($305K–$460K).
Staff Product Manager (AI) at Headway — NYC. Own a Patient/Provider/Payer area at the Series D mental-health marketplace ($212K–$265K).
Research Engineer / Research Scientist, Tokens at Anthropic — NYC. Frontier ML research on tokenization for Claude.
Forward Deployed Engineer Lead, LLM Post-Training at Reflection AI — NYC. Lead post-training and evaluation of Reflection’s open-weight foundation models.
Founders — list your openings with PMAI: if you’re hiring AI/ML talent and want our community to see it, drop the role at https://community.pioneeringminds.ai/c/job-corner/