Hello everyone! AITX Team here with more updates this week.
If you’re new here, welcome! 👋 At AITX, we aim to:
Connect you with like-minded peers passionate about AI.
Provide a space for sharing ideas and receiving feedback on AI projects you’re building.
Share helpful tools and invaluable resources.
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Before we jump into the regular news, a few housekeeping items:
Upcoming AITX Events:
Austin AITX Monthly Meetup: Tuesday, September 23 | sign up here!
Hack AI: Wednesday, September 10 | sign up here!
To stay in the loop on all our monthly meetups and other community organized events, subscribe to our AITX calendar here.
Check out our Community Directory:
Where you can fill out your profile and find other members of the AITX community. If you haven’t filled out your profile yet, please follow the link HERE and submit your information.
🎙 Episode 3 is Live 🎙
Our third episode is with Ashia Lewis-Livaudais, a computational physicist, research engineer, and the founder/CEO of Symby AI.
Our conversation spans Ashia's personal story growing up in New Orleans and getting her PhD, her professional experience as a self-described “Research Engineer”, and how she got started building AI models to help advance science, which led to her founding a startup, Symby AI. Symby uses advanced AI models to help researchers do better science.
Check it out 👇
In this week’s edition you’re getting:
5 Upcoming Events
3 AI Community Stories
1 Community Highlight
So let’s jump in!
UPCOMING EVENTS
When: Wednesday, September 17 | 5:30 PM - 8:30 PM CST
Where: Capital Factory, Voltron Room (1st floor) 701 Brazos Street · Austin, TX
What: Join PyTorch ATX this September for a hands-on look at the next generation of AI inference pipelines. We’ll explore the full modern stack—from aggressive model-size reductions like INT4/INT8 quantization and pruning, dynamic batching, paged-attention memory tricks, and multi-node scheduling. We'll dive into vLLM—today’s most popular open-source engine for high-throughput LLM inference—alongside other cutting edge inference stacks.
When: Tuesday, September 23 | 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM CST
Where: The Center for Government and Civic Service 1218 West Ave Bldg 3000 · Austin, TX
What: Join ACM Austin for an evening of cutting-edge insights at the intersection of game AI and container security. Connect with Austin’s tech community while learning from two expert speakers pushing the boundaries of AI and secure software engineering.
When: Tuesday, September 9 | 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM CST
Where: ACC - RGC 3000 1218 West Avenue · Austin, TX
What: New updates, lightning talks, showcase + hands-on lab
💻 Hack AI
When: Wednesday, September 10 | 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM CST
Where: Capital Factory Austin, Texas
What: A monthly session for builders all over the Austin area to learn about and build the latest AI technology.
When: Thursday, September 11 | 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM CST
Where: Qubika 1141 Shady Ln · austin, TX
What: This meetup will cover two hot topics on the Databricks Lakehouse:
Unity Catalog Governance (Aldis Stareczek, Solutions Engineer, Databricks Champion) Learn how to design secure and scalable governance with Unity Catalog: modeling access across catalogs/schemas/tables, implementing lineage and auditing for compliance, and applying promotion patterns across workspaces while avoiding common pitfalls.
Building & Evaluating AI Agents (Nicolás Peláez, GenAI and ML at Databricks) Discover how to design agentic workflows on the Lakehouse—tool use, retrieval, orchestration, and guardrails—then evaluate them with offline/online tests, task-success metrics, and tracing-driven iteration. Finally, see how to productionize with serving, vector search, and Unity Catalog integration.
COMMUNITY STORIES
Two East Texas families are suing Character.AI, claiming the chatbot caused severe psychological harm to their kids. At the same time, OpenAI announced new parental controls for ChatGPT after facing its own wrongful death lawsuit.
Why it matters: These cases could shape how AI companies handle youth protections—and Texas courts are becoming ground zero for defining AI safety.
Need-to-know:
Families allege Character.AI encouraged self-harm and violent behavior in minors.
A California lawsuit accuses ChatGPT of aiding a teen’s suicide, prompting new parental controls.
Critics argue industry changes so far are too little, too late.
Learn more here.
TXSE Group, parent company of the Texas Stock Exchange, just launched Oculon Intelligence in Dallas. The new division will use AI to provide analytics, regulatory reporting, and fraud detection tools for broker-dealers and other market players.
Why it matters: It’s another sign that Dallas isn’t just chasing finance; it’s becoming a hub for AI-powered fintech infrastructure.
Need-to-know:
Oculon runs as an independent division of TXSE Group.
Focus areas: market surveillance, compliance, fraud detection.
Based in Dallas’s Knox-Henderson district at Weir’s Plaza.
Learn more here.
Texas Critical Data Centers (a JV between New Era Energy & Sharon AI) signed a deal with Thunderhead Energy to build a 250 MW natural gas facility in Ector County. The power plant will support TCDC’s massive AI-focused compute campus.
Why it matters: West Texas is positioning itself as the energy backbone for the AI boom, marrying oil-and-gas expertise with next-gen compute needs.
Need-to-know:
Facility will serve as the backbone for TCDC’s high-performance AI campus.
Campus is scalable to 1 gigawatt, with over 400 acres already secured.
New Era Energy rebranded from a helium company to focus on AI-ready infrastructure.
Learn more here.
That’s all for now, folks!
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