Silkroad Innovation Hub

Silkroad Innovation Hub Community in Silicon Valley for founders and startups from Central Eurasia 🇰🇿🇺🇿🇰🇬🇹🇯🇹🇲🇦🇿🇹🇷🇲🇳

Our partners are organizing Global Tech Weekend Tbilisi 2026 and inviting you to be part of it, taking place June 19–21 ...
06/08/2026

Our partners are organizing Global Tech Weekend Tbilisi 2026 and inviting you to be part of it, taking place June 19–21 at Factory Tbilisi - a decentralized, cross-city innovation platform connecting corporates, founders, governments, investors, startups, and universities across the Caucasus and Central Asia.

🚀 About the Event:

Global Tech Weekend Tbilisi is a three-day, multi-format conference bringing together over 10,000 attendees, 200+ speakers, and participants from 50+ countries.

💡 The program includes:
• A flagship main conference
• 80+ side events hosted by community and partner organizations across the city
• Keynotes, panel discussions, startup pitches, and expo zone
• Investor meetups and networking sessions
• Workshops and hands-on sessions

Topics covered include Artificial Intelligence, FinTech, Web3, Gaming, AgriTech, Digital Marketing, E-Sports, and more.

👉🏻 Why Participate?

GTWT offers a unique opportunity to engage with a diverse, internationally minded audience at one of the region’s largest technology gatherings. Whether as a speaker, exhibitor, community partner, or attendee, participation provides direct access to a vibrant ecosystem of tech professionals, entrepreneurs, and decision-makers from across the Caucasus, Central Asia, and beyond.

🤝 We would love to explore your potential involvement - whether through speaking opportunities, side event hosting, exhibition presence, being an attendee of the event, or other forms of engagement. We are happy to discuss the format and terms that best align with your organization’s or personal goals.

💻 For more information about the event, please visit: https://gtwt.ge
tech.weekend.tbilisi

AI Leaders: Week 8 RecapWe started with Diyi Yang from Stanford HAI, who presented research on human-agent collaboration...
06/02/2026

AI Leaders: Week 8 Recap

We started with Diyi Yang from Stanford HAI, who presented research on human-agent collaboration across 800+ workflows and 100 occupations.She also showed that AI agents are significantly faster and cheaper, but tend to produce lower quality work and sometimes fabricate results.

Next, Abay Absamet from Silkroad Angels covered the investor perspective on AI — what signals matter when evaluating AI startups and where the region’s opportunities lie.

We wrapped with Vugar Abdullayev from CAYU, who ran a government-focused workshop.

AI Leaders: Week 7 RecapWe started the week with Angela Aristidou from Stanford HAI’s Digital Economy Lab. Her session w...
06/02/2026

AI Leaders: Week 7 Recap

We started the week with Angela Aristidou from Stanford HAI’s Digital Economy Lab. Her session was on what actually makes AI work inside organizations — the prerequisites for real business value.

Next, Zamir Akimbekov and Vugar Abdullayev from CAYU ran industry-specific workshops for banking and mining. The banking session covered AI agents for loan processing — compliance checks, document review, and borrower communications.

AI Leaders: Week 6 RecapWe started the week with Atakan Varol, Director of ISSAI at Nazarbayev University. His session c...
05/25/2026

AI Leaders: Week 6 Recap

We started the week with Atakan Varol, Director of ISSAI at Nazarbayev University. His session covered localizing generative AI for resource-constrained environments — from ISSAI’s KazLLM, the first large language model built in Central Asia, to a practical deployment framework for executives: on-premise, colocation, cloud, or SaaS.

Next, Mykel Kochenderfer from Stanford HAI walked us through decision-making under uncertainty — drawing on examples from mathematics, AI systems, and aviation to show how rigorous frameworks for uncertainty can lead to better, more reliable decisions even when the full picture isn’t clear.

We wrapped the week with Zamir Akimbekov and Vugar Abdullayev from CAYU, a Silicon Valley startup bringing vibe coding to enterprise — a hands-on session on building AI agents.

AI Leaders: Week 4 RecapWe started the week with Tatsunori Hashimoto, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanfor...
04/30/2026

AI Leaders: Week 4 Recap

We started the week with Tatsunori Hashimoto, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford 🎓, who came in with a different goal than most sessions — not to tell us what AI can do today, but to give us the mental model to figure out where it’s going tomorrow.

We went deep into how language models are actually built — from next-word prediction all the way through to scaling laws and reasoning models.

Following on the next day we had Shaig Abduragimov from OpenAI Academy walking us through Codex — OpenAI’s AI agent that works across your computer, files, and tools. Despite the name, this one isn’t just for engineers. Shaig made the case that Codex is genuinely useful for data analysis, document processing, email triage, and everyday productivity automation — no technical background required.

To close out the week, we had Fadi Touza from Lovable and Zac Frulloni, who showed the cohort how to go from idea to working software product — without writing a single line of code.

We hosted first ever Nauryz in the history of Stanford GSB! With yurt 🛖 right in the middle of Stanford GSB, whole qazan...
04/28/2026

We hosted first ever Nauryz in the history of Stanford GSB!

With yurt 🛖 right in the middle of Stanford GSB, whole qazan of plov and other Central Asian food, we hosted the community of Stanford students, sharing a piece of our culture 🇦🇿🇹🇯🇹🇲🇰🇿🇰🇬🇺🇿

Big thanks to for organizing this historical event, and at Silkroad Innovation Hub we are happy to support our community in Silicon Valley.

Congratulations with opening of .ai.ast the International Artificial Intelligence Center in Kazakhstan! This is a big d...
04/27/2026

Congratulations with opening of .ai.ast the International Artificial Intelligence Center in Kazakhstan! 

This is a big deal for our region! From research and education to startup innovation and real AI solutions all come together. 

As Silkroad Innovation Hub, we are always happy to support initiatives that push our ecosystem forward.

AI Leaders: Week 3 RecapWe are on week 3 of AI Leaders Program from Stanford HAI and OpenAI Academy, and this week we st...
04/23/2026

AI Leaders: Week 3 Recap

We are on week 3 of AI Leaders Program from Stanford HAI and OpenAI Academy, and this week we started off with a lecture on “Building an AI-Powered Organization” from Arvind Karunakaran, where we went through the essential steps toward building an AI-enabled organization from the ground up — from structuring the right teams to embedding AI into decision-making at every level.

Following on the next day we had Shaig Abduragimov from OpenAI Academy with a hands-on workshop on getting the most out of ChatGPT — covering practical techniques that leaders and their teams can start applying right away.

To close out the week, we had an AI Strategy session led by Renat Khairulin and the AI Leaders facilitators team, where we worked through the key steps toward building a concrete AI strategy for your organization.

AI Leaders: Week 2 RecapWeek 2 of AI Leaders Program and we had two strong sessions back to back. First up was Michael B...
04/23/2026

AI Leaders: Week 2 Recap

Week 2 of AI Leaders Program and we had two strong sessions back to back. First up was Michael Bernstein from Stanford University HAI, with a lecture on “What AI Can and Can’t Do”. The key idea: AI performs the same at the model level regardless of the task, but the tolerance for error is completely different depending on whether you’re dealing with a rough-edged problem (many valid answers) or a sharp-edged one (exactly one right answer). That distinction alone changes how you think about where to actually deploy AI in your organization.

Following on the next day we had Lauren Oliphant from OpenAI Academy with a hands-on ChatGPT 101 session, covering practical foundations for using ChatGPT — from file analysis and voice mode to a clean framework for prompting: Task, Context, and Expectations. Simple in theory, but properly applying all three makes a noticeable difference in the quality of outputs.

AI Leaders: Week 1 RecapWe kicked off AI Leaders Program from Stanford HAI and OpenAI Academy with the welcome speech fr...
04/23/2026

AI Leaders: Week 1 Recap

We kicked off AI Leaders Program from Stanford HAI and OpenAI Academy with the welcome speech from Deputy Prime Minister of Kazakhstan Zhaslan Madiyev and with our first lecture from Peter Norvig — one of the most recognized names in AI — on “The AI Landscape: Past, Present & Future,” where we went all the way from the 1970s roots of the field through to where we are today with large language models and autonomous agents.

Peter walked us through the three forces that made the current AI moment possible — data, compute, and better algorithms — and why all three had to converge at the same time for this to happen. We also got into the distinction between discriminative and generative AI, and what it actually means for organizations to build with AI responsibly.

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