State of the Union: Why Local, Why Now
Nader Khalil · Alex Cheema · Matthew Berman · Ahmad Osman · Joseph Nelson
AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 · 44:29
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AI media, education, and workflow tools
Forward Future
Forward Future is an AI media and education company helping professionals understand and use AI. Its The Future Today newsletter provides a free daily briefing, while Matthew Berman’s YouTube channel offers tutorials, news analysis, and interviews. Forward Future Live adds weekly analysis and guest panels. Forward Future University, free during its beta, extends that coverage into practical lessons on prompt engineering, model settings, reusable templates, and building applications with AI.
Matthew Berman founded Forward Future with co-founder Nick Wentz. Its practical focus also extends to public workflow tools. Relay is a coding-environment skill that discovers available models and routes a task through planning, execution, and independent review, assigning models by capability and cost. It works with models exposed by the host environment rather than requiring a particular provider. The company’s Loop Library helps users find and understand repeatable agent workflows.
In its media kit available in August 2026, the company reported 623,000+ YouTube subscribers, more than 90,000 average views per video, and 75,000+ newsletter subscribers. Its commercial offering includes sponsored YouTube integrations, dedicated videos, and newsletter advertising, serving brands seeking to reach technical leaders, engineers, founders, and other AI decision-makers.
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Affiliations reflect their AIE appearances, not necessarily current employment.
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Managing models and context locally
The panel discusses multi-model routing and context management alongside specialized models and fine-tuning, while considering remaining technical and open-source-access challenges.
Affiliations reflect each recorded session, not necessarily current employment. The local AI session is a joint panel discussion with Matthew Berman and speakers from other organizations.