Startup Grind NYC

🚨 You must complete your RSVP here to be considered to attend:
https://www.startupgrind.com/events/details/startup-grind-new-york-city-presents-the-ai-briefing-by-startup-grind-2/

📜 ​This Month’s Source: 2026 Report on the State of the US Legal Market (Thomson Reuters 2026)

​Law firms have a historical habit of surging just before they stumble. Current demand levels mirror the peaks of 2007 and 2021 immediately preceding major corrections.

​As we approach a forecasted market contraction in mid-2026, the winners will be determined by technological sophistication rather than traditional prestige.

​🏔️ The Mission: Reinforcing your footing before the ground shifts. This session moves past AI hype to analyze the economic arbitrage of talent and tech in a high-interest, high-complexity environment.

​📊 The Format:

• ​10-Minute Executive Download: A rapid-fire summary of the 2025 demand surge: how regulatory whiplash and geo-economic instability created an atypical parallel boom in both transactional and litigation work.
• ​Operational Reality Check: The In-House Threat: over half of corporate legal departments plan to move more work in-house over the next five years as they adopt their own AI tools.
• ​Cross-Pollinated Debate: Builders share how AI compresses 10 hours of work into two. Executives share why they are still waiting for the first side to blink on pricing.

🚨 You must complete your RSVP here to be considered to attend:
https://www.startupgrind.com/events/details/startup-grind-new-york-city-presents-the-ai-briefing-by-startup-grind-2/

​🤝 Who Should Attend:

• ​Enterprise Executives: Discover why your outside counsel is stuck in a zero-sum negotiation over efficiency gains.
• ​Founders & Builders: Identify the specific practice areas (Regulatory, Healthcare, Pharma) that remain recession-proof in the 2026 outlook.
• ​Operations Leads: Master the five stages of the Value Chain Health Diagnostic to identify where your organization is creating or destroying value.

​📍 Where: Location on approval 🗓️ When: Friday, March 13th | 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM

​📬 The Prep: This is a working session, not a lecture. Review the report here. Bring your perspective.

​RSVP to be considered. Strictly limited capacity to ensure high-quality dialogue.

🚨 You must complete your RSVP here to be considered to attend:
https://www.startupgrind.com/events/details/startup-grind-new-york-city-presents-the-ai-briefing-by-startup-grind-2/

🚨 You must click below and complete your RSVP to attend:
https://www.startupgrind.com/events/details/startup-grind-new-york-city-presents-the-startup-pitch-demo-showcase-3/

The format is fast-paced and interactive. After each demo, the floor is open for questions, ideas, and honest feedback from the community.

We welcome investors who want an unfiltered look at new technology and early-stage teams.

• 📅 Date: Thursday, February 19th
• 🕓 Time: 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
• 📍 Venue: The Yard: Herald Square
• 🎫 Tickets: Only $5 (includes happy hour refreshments)
• 📑 Founders: **Sign up here to pitch **at an upcoming event

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

• Startups ready to demo a real product and get honest feedback
• Engineers, PMs, and designers who love seeing new tech in action
• Investors looking for a ground-floor, early look at local startups
• Anyone in the NYC tech scene who wants to connect with and support the people building things

AGENDA

• 5:30 PM: Doors Open & Networking
• 6:00 PM: Startup Pitches & Demos with Audience Q&A
• 7:00 PM: Meet the Presenting Startups

PITCH FORMAT

• Pitch & Demo - 6 minutes
• Audience Q&A - 4 minutes
• Pitch deck AND product demo are required

🚨 You must click below and complete your RSVP to attend:
https://www.startupgrind.com/events/details/startup-grind-new-york-city-presents-the-startup-pitch-demo-showcase-3/

We're at the new Time Out Market at Union Square. It features a selection of the city's best food and drink together under one roof, offering a wide variety of options to choose from throughout the event.

Look for Startup Grind table signs toward the back near the outdoor patio.

Sasha Stiles is a first-generation Kalmyk-American poet and AI researcher whose practice sits at the intersection of text and experimental media. Her current MoMA installation, A LIVING POEM, functions as an infinite text that continuously rewrites itself.

It turns a museum screen into an evolving, immersive system.

In collaboration with the National Arts Club and its Art and Technology Committee, this conversation with Sasha will dive into the technical and philosophical hurdles of building poetic intelligence.

You'll learn how she moves past the hype of large language models to look at the mechanics of co-authorship between humans and machines.

Are You Using AI? Here's Why You Should Attend:

While the project lives in a museum, the underlying engineering addresses core challenges in generative AI development. Practitioners should attend to observe how these concepts are applied in a high-stakes, public environment:

• 👤 Bespoke Model Training: Sasha built a custom language model trained on her own writing and voice to create an AI alter ego named Technelegy.
• 🎛️ Technical Levers and Prompt Engineering: The installation uses curated prompts and formal levers to control parameters like tone, length, and structure.
• 🔄 Recursive Output: The poem performs itself anew roughly every 60 minutes; no two visits are exactly the same.
• ✍️ Cursive Binary: This custom typeface merges handwriting with binary code to visualize the fusion of human and machine language.
• ⛓️ Blockchain and Provenance: As a co-founder of theVERSEverse, Sasha explores how digital poetry behaves on the blockchain and uses digital animation to test how language behaves when partially automated.

If you are building LLMs, exploring decentralized art, or interested in the future of human-computer interaction, you should definitely join us for a deep look into how generative systems can augment rather than replace human creativity.