From Brussels with code: Two days at the heart of Open Source AI

There are conferences you attend because they’re on the calendar — and then there are the ones that pull you back to the roots of why you build things in the first place. Brussels, on the first weekend of February, delivered both clarity and spark.

Our team spent two intense days at FOSDEM 2026 and the AI Plumbers (un)conference, and the experience felt less like a trip and more like a reminder: open source is still where the real engineering happens.

FOSDEM remains one of the world's premier open-source software conferences. The 2026 schedule counted over a thousand events across dozens of tracks and rooms, which tells you everything about its scale and density. But what makes it special is its structure: developer rooms are organized by open-source projects and communities themselves. It’s community governance in practice, not just in principle.

We were especially proud to help organize and support the AI Plumbers Devroom on Saturday. This full-day track, curated in collaboration with AIFoundry.org, focused squarely on the infrastructure layer of AI: efficient inference engines, hardware acceleration, low-level optimizations, energy-aware computing, and making powerful models run on everything from microcontrollers to RISC-V boards and consumer GPUs.

We’re deeply grateful to all speakers who shared their work so openly — not just polished outcomes, but real constraints, trade-offs, and lessons learned. Thank you for the preparation, the technical depth, and the generosity in Q&A that turned each session into a genuine exchange.

Seeing a room packed with developers sketching architectures on notebooks, asking sharp technical questions and connecting over shared challenges - that’s the FOSDEM spirit. It’s why we were there: not just to listen, but to facilitate and be part of that exchange.

Right after FOSDEM the momentum carried over to the AI Plumbers (un)conference – a relaxed, hardware-focused fringe event organized by AIFoundry.org. This wasn't a traditional conference, it was an unconference-style day dedicated to hands-on discussions, unresolved issues, live demos and collaborative problem-solving around AI hardware, embodied AI and low-cost experimentation.

Our team delivered a talk titled "The $100 Robot Arm: Low-Cost Open-Source Infrastructure for Embodied AI Inference", exploring how to make robotics and on-device AI accessible and affordable without sacrificing quality. At Cybergizer, we believe this is where meaningful innovation compounds: when you make advanced capabilities accessible enough for more builders to test, fail, iterate and contribute back.

The entire day felt like an extended hallway track from FOSDEM – more time to dive into specifics, whiteboard thorny problems and connect over coffee. With its emphasis on open-sourcing hardware efforts and bringing together practitioners facing the same constraints, it perfectly extended the devroom's energy.

At our company, we don’t attend events like FOSDEM or AI Plumbers just to stay “visible”. We show up because this is our ecosystem. To ensure knowledge flows freely, to turn hallway arguments into tomorrow's projects and to remember that progress in AI isn't just about smarter models, but about more accessible, reliable and sustainable systems.

These gatherings remind us that AI isn’t magic. It’s engineering. It’s trade-offs. It’s long nights chasing performance bugs and energy regressions. And it’s a shared effort — across companies, countries and communities.

Two days, dozens of talks, countless hallway conversations — and a renewed sense of purpose. Thanks to everyone who joined us in Brussels, especially the organizers, speakers, and contributors who made both events feel alive, useful and grounded in real engineering.

Open source AI is alive, messy and moving fast.

And we’re proud to be part of the group pushing it forward.