Timmy Ghiurau

Timmy Ghiurau is the co-founder of MidBrain (midbrain.ai), where he develops a memory and continuous learning layer for AI agents – infrastructure that enables agents to learn from experience rather than simply storing it. He spent over a decade at Volvo Cars as an innovation leader in XR, simulation, and autonomous driving user experience, where he established the company’s “Innovation Arena”; prior to that, he helped Unity Technologies expand the industrial application of simulations and AI. He is also the co-founder of The Point Labs – a “new immersive Bauhaus” blending creativity with technology – and runs aiverse.design, a reference library for AI UX patterns, while also advising the European Commission and national institutions on AI strategy and innovation. He writes and speaks about memory, learning, and the design of systems that remember so that humans don’t have to.

He dedicates his keynote speech at the Art & Tech Conference 2026 to the topic:

The Future Learns: Building Lifelong Intelligence

Today, we are creating increasingly powerful AI systems, yet most still operate in a fragmented manner. They respond, act, and vanish; they have access to vast amounts of information but rarely change in a meaningful way based on what happened yesterday. Human intelligence works differently. We are constantly learning from experience, building models of the world, forgetting what is no longer important, adapting our behavior, and carrying those changes into our future actions.

In this talk, Timmy Ghiurau explores what happens when artificial intelligence begins to do the same.
Starting with lifelong learning, memory, and world models, he looks beyond the technology toward the world these systems could create: proactive agents that understand context before we even ask; intelligence that persists across devices and environments; and interfaces that evolve from screens and commands into long-term relationships.
Yet, this is not merely a technical shift. It transforms how we think about work, education, creativity, products, markets, and institutions. If AI can learn continuously, who decides what it should remember? What happens when its behavior changes after deployment? How do we audit what it has learned, protect privacy, correct errors, and determine which knowledge or judgment should remain in human hands?

Through foresight and world-building, this talk bridges neuroscience, design, AI research, economics, and policy to envision multiple possible futures rather than predicting a single one.
The question is no longer just about how intelligent AI will become. It is about the kind of intelligence we want to live with – and the kind of people we want to become alongside it.

“For years, I thought I had to choose between being a musician,
a creative, a futurist, or a tech enthusiast—until I realized that the most interesting place to be is right in the middle. Being a creative among tech enthusiasts, and a tech enthusiast among creatives.
Most of my work to date has emerged precisely from crossing these boundaries, rather than
choosing one side.”