Fireworks Forge Conference Adds Major Speakers: Notion, DHH Lead AI Lineup
Fireworks Forge adds Notion's AI Head, Rails creator DHH, and AI startup founder to its speaker lineup.
AI infrastructure company Fireworks has announced three new speakers for its Forge conference: Notion AI Head Sarah Sachs, Ruby on Rails creator and 37signals CTO DHH, and Instinct founder Noah Shinn. They represent enterprise AI scaling, critical pushback on tech narratives, and startup agility respectively. DHH's inclusion is especially notable given his contrarian stance on AI tools, which is likely to spark the most debate at the event.
Fireworks Forge Speaker Lineup Continues to Grow
AI infrastructure company Fireworks recently announced another expansion of its Fireworks Forge conference speaker lineup, adding three high-profile industry figures. This event, centered on AI applications and development, is drawing an increasingly diverse range of voices from the front lines of product, engineering, and entrepreneurship.
According to the official announcement, the newly added speakers represent three distinct dimensions: enterprise-grade AI products, developer culture, and AI startups — reflecting the conference's intent to bridge conversations between technical implementation and broader industry trends.
A Closer Look at the Three New Speakers
Sarah Sachs, Head of AI at Notion
The first new addition is Sarah Sachs (@sarahmsachs), Head of AI at Notion. Notion, the well-known collaboration and knowledge management tool, has deeply integrated AI into its product experience in recent years — spanning intelligent writing, knowledge retrieval, and workflow automation. As the team's AI lead, her talk will likely focus on how to deploy generative AI at scale within a mature SaaS product, as well as real user needs and feedback around AI features from enterprise customers.
Notion fully integrated generative AI capabilities as "Notion AI" around 2023, covering text generation, summarization, translation, and Q&A retrieval. Unlike standalone AI writing tools, the core challenge for Notion AI is embedding large language model capabilities into a knowledge base product already used by millions of enterprise and individual users — one with highly heterogeneous data structures — while addressing enterprise requirements around data privacy, output consistency, and user trust. This implementation path offers strong reference value for SaaS companies wrestling with the same question of how to add AI to an existing product.
DHH, Creator of Rails and CTO of 37signals
The figure drawing the most attention from the developer community is undoubtedly David Heinemeier Hansson (@dhh) — creator of Ruby on Rails and CTO of 37signals. DHH has always been known for his sharp technical opinions and independent stance on industry trends. His views on cloud computing, developer productivity, and AI tools frequently spark widespread debate. With AI coding tools now dominating developer workflows, DHH's presence signals that the conference may feature critical scrutiny of prevailing narratives, rather than uncritical enthusiasm.
Ruby on Rails is the open-source web application framework DHH released in 2004. Built on the principles of "Convention over Configuration" and "Don't Repeat Yourself" (DRY), it dramatically lowered the barrier to web development and profoundly influenced an entire generation of developers and subsequent frameworks like Django and Laravel. 37signals is his company, known for products including project management tool Basecamp and business email service HEY. In recent years, DHH made waves again by leading 37signals' "cloud exit" — migrating services from AWS back to owned hardware — while publicly challenging the cost mythology around cloud computing. Against the backdrop of AI coding assistants (like GitHub Copilot and Cursor) sweeping through developer workflows, DHH holds a cautious, even critical stance toward AI tools, arguing that over-reliance on AI risks eroding developers' core competencies and code ownership. This puts him in sharp tension with the dominant industry narrative.
Noah Shinn, Founder of Instinct
The third speaker is Noah Shinn (@noahrshinn), founder of Instinct. As a representative of AI startups, his talk is expected to focus on hands-on experience building AI products from scratch, and how founding teams can find their footing within a rapidly evolving model ecosystem.
Why This Lineup Is Worth Paying Attention To
By bringing together an enterprise product leader, a seasoned technical veteran, and a startup founder in the same event, Fireworks is clearly aiming to present multiple perspectives on AI adoption. Sarah Sachs represents the considerations of scale and stability on the enterprise side; DHH brings critical thinking about technology trends; and Noah Shinn reflects the agility and exploration of the startup ecosystem.
For practitioners focused on AI development and application, the value of events like this often lies not in a single product launch, but in the collision of viewpoints from different standpoints. DHH in particular — a technical figure accustomed to swimming against the current — may well generate the most discussion of anyone at the event.
Closing Thoughts
Fireworks has been progressively announcing speakers, and the full list can be viewed through official channels. As the lineup continues to grow, this event is shaping up to be a meaningful window into the current state of AI application in the real world. For readers who want to understand how enterprises, developer communities, and startups are each navigating the AI wave, it's worth keeping an eye on agenda details as they're released.
(Note: This article is based on Fireworks' official social media announcements. Please refer to the organizer's final publications for confirmed agenda details.)
Related articles
AI Digital Twin in Action: Using DOT to Automatically Track Bugs and User Feedback
DOTS engineers demonstrate how AI digital twin DOT collects cross-platform user feedback, categorizes issue themes, opens threads to investigate bug root causes, and submits PRs—showcasing a complete AI agent workflow for defect triage with auditable design.
Why Transistors Are No Longer Flat: The Evolution from Planar to Gate-All-Around
Transistor evolution from planar to FinFET to gate-all-around: why gates went from three-sided to four-sided wrapping to suppress short-channel effects and leakage current, extending Moore's Law.
Swarm Intelligence = a Single RL Agent? A Proof of Multi-Armed Bandit Equivalence
A paper proves that collective decision-making through local imitation in swarms is mathematically equivalent to single-agent reinforcement learning: N blind imitators act as N parallel environment samples, with an effective learning rate of 1/N. This article explains the derivation and implications of the Maynard-Cross Learning algorithm.