Ben Lamm (left) and John Carmack [Photos: Venture Dallas]

Noted programmer and AI entrepreneur John Carmack, the founder of Keen Technologies, and biotech innovator Ben Lamm, co-founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences, will take the stage together at the fifth annual Venture Dallas conference to discuss artificial general intelligence (AGI) and de-extinction—two ambitious frontiers in technology.

The conference will be held Oct. 30 at the George W. Bush Presidential Center and will assemble more than 500 entrepreneurs, investors, and business leaders for a day of transformative ideas and connections, Venture Dallas said.

“John Carmack and Ben Lamm are category creators at the frontier of AGI and biotech, bringing the boldest visions yet to Venture Dallas,” Bryan Chambers, president of Capital Factory and co-founder of Venture Dallas, said in a statement. “If AGI is built here, Dallas will set the pace for the world’s tech economy. John Carmack and Keen Technologies are Capital Factory’s moonshot investment in AGI.”

Venture Dallas noted that Carmack, co-founder of id Software and a pioneer behind Doom and Quake, helped create the modern video game industry before redefining virtual reality as chief technology officer of Oculus. In 2022, Carmack founded Keen Technologies in Dallas with backing from Sequoia Capital, Capital Factory, and others. According to Venture Dallas, Carmack, partnering with reinforcement-learning pioneer Dr. Richard S. Sutton, has built a team of leading AI researchers dedicated to developing AGI.

Dallas Innovates profiled Carmack and explored his quest for AGI in this 2023 story.

Lamm is a serial entrepreneur who launched multiple high-growth ventures including Hypergiant and now leads Colossal Biosciences, Texas’ first decacorn, valued at more than $10 billion. Colossal was co-founded with Harvard geneticist Dr. George Church and is advancing species revival projects for the woolly mammoth, thylacine, and dodo, with the broader mission of restoring ecosystems and supporting planetary preservation.

The company has raised more than $435 million and launched spinouts including Form Bio, a computational life sciences platform.

This year’s speaker lineup also includes venture capital leader Tim Draper—whose early bets include Hotmail, Tesla, Ring, DocuSign, Coinbase, and Twitch—and Bobby Franklin, president and CEO of the National Venture Capital Association, with more speaker announcements to come.

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