COSM A Technology Summit

COSM is an exclusive national summit on the converging technologies remaking the world as we know it. The mission of the conference is to stimulate debate and deliberation amongst industry leaders on the unities animating these apparently divergent technology areas. Subscribe to see forthcoming videos and for information on this year’s COSM, November 19-21 in Scottsdale, Arizona.

A Taste of COSM

Past Speakers

Designed by famed technology futurist, George Gilder, COSM boasts an astounding array of speakers. Keynotes have included Peter Thiel, Cathie Wood, Ari Emanuel, Newt Gingrich, Stephen Wolfram, Jim Tour, Kai-Fu Lee, Stephen C. Meyer, Michael Shellenberger, Bob Metcalfe, Eric Schmidt, Ray Kurzweil, Michael Milken, Larry Sanger, and Federico Faggin, among others. Our panels stimulate lively discussion between specialists in their respective fields, from Babak Parviz and Keith Krach to John Tamny and Kristin Zimmerman. Every year, Kyoto Prize winner Carver Mead crowns the discussion with his sage reflections.

Larry Sanger

Philosopher, internet entrepreneur, and co-founder of Wikipedia
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February 21, 2025
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Larry Sanger is an American philosopher, internet entrepreneur, and co-founder of Wikipedia. He studied philosophy at Reed College and earned a Ph.D. from Ohio State University. In 2001, he helped create Wikipedia. Sanger coined Wikipedia’s name, and drafted many of its early standards, including its then fundamental principle of “Neutral point of view”. Sanger has contributed to numerous encyclopedic endeavors since, culminating in his current work on the decentralized Encyclosphere, searchable at Encyclosearch. As President of the Knowledge Standards Foundation, Sanger presides over an effort to develop standards and tools to knit together a new kind of encyclopedia with entries sourced and vetted from across the Web. …

Ray Kurzweil

Author, Inventor, Futurist
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August 15, 2023
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Ray Kurzweil has been described as “the restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and PBS selected Ray as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries. He is considered one of the world’s leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists, with a 30-year track record of accurate predictions. Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer …

Michael Milken

Chairman, Milken Institute, author of Faster Cures
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July 5, 2023
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Michael Milken, in full Michael Robert Milken, (born July 4, 1946, Encino, California, U.S.), American financier whose “junk-bond” operations fueled many of the corporate takeovers of the 1980s. …

Michael Shellenberger

Author and Founder, Environmental Progress
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June 15, 2023
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Michael D. Shellenberger is an American author and former public relations professional whose writing has focused on the intersection of politics, the environment, climate change and nuclear power, as well as more recently on how he believes progressivism is linked to homelessness, drug addiction and mental illness. He is a co-founder of the Breakthrough Institute and the California Peace Coalition. He is also the founder of Environmental Progress. …

Peter Thiel

Technology entrepreneur, investor, philanthropist
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September 4, 2022
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Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor. He cofounded PayPal, led it as CEO, and took it public; he made the first outside investment in Facebook, where he serves as a director; and he cofounded Palantir Technologies, where he serves as chairman. He has provided early funding for LinkedIn, Yelp, and dozens of startups, many run by former colleagues who have been dubbed the “PayPal Mafia.” He is a partner at Founders Fund, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has funded companies including SpaceX and Airbnb. He started the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young entrepreneurs, and he leads the Thiel Foundation, which works to advance technological progress and long-term thinking. He is also the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to …

Eric Schmidt

Co-Founder, Schmidt Futures and Former CEO & Chairman, Google
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August 4, 2022
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Eric Emerson Schmidt is an American businessman and software engineer known for being the CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, executive chairman of Google from 2011 to 2015, executive chairman of Alphabet Inc. from 2015 to 2017, and Technical Advisor at Alphabet from 2017 to 2020. …

Babak Parviz

Venture Partner, Madrona
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August 3, 2022
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He received his graduate degrees from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. From 2000 to 2001 he was with Nanovation Technologies as a designer and product manager for photonic devices. From 2001 to 2003 he was a postdoctoral fellow in chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University working on self-assembly, biomedical devices (he co-invented the method resulting in the founding of Claros Diagnostics Inc. (acquired by OPKO Health)), and organic devices. He has been an assistant professor (2003-2008), an associate professor (2008-2012), and an affiliate professor (2012-present) in the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Washington. He was with Google from 2010 to 2014 where he was a Google Distinguished Engineer and a Director at Google . He is the creator of …

Carver Mead

Gordon and Betty Moore Professor Emeritus of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology
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October 10, 2019
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Carver Andress Mead (born 1 May 1934) is an American scientist and engineer. He currently holds the position of Gordon and Betty Moore Professor Emeritus of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), having taught there for over 40 years. Mead is an enthusiastic instructor, and he advised the first female electrical engineering student at Caltech, Louise Kirkbride. His contributions as a teacher include the classic textbook Introduction to VLSI Systems (1980), which he coauthored with Lynn Conway. A pioneer of modern microelectronics, he has made contributions to the development and design of semiconductors, digital chips, and silicon compilers, technologies which form the foundations of modern very-large-scale integration chip design. In the …

Consequential Ideas

Because COSM offers you what no other conference can. COSM brings you directly in touch with the top thinkers powering tomorrow’s most consequential technology.

Informed Decisions

In this new era of innovation, everyone will be affected, but only a relative few will be prepared to understand — and make the best and most informed decisions about — the biggest technology upheavals and upsides we’ve experienced in a generation. 

New Gingrich China Debate

A Diversity of Thought

The conference is targeted toward anyone seeking to engage with a diversity of thinkers and ideas about the future of technology, including corporate senior executives (CEOs, CTOs, and CIOs), investors, researchers, and technologists.