Conference

TEDAI Will No Longer Take Place in Vienna

co-produced by AI30. October 2026, 19:16

Illuminated grand staircase with red carpet in Vienna's Hofburg at the TEDAI Vienna opening gala — The grand staircase of Vienna's Hofburg during a TEDAI Vienna gala. © melourra

The curtain has fallen, and it is staying down. TEDAI Vienna, which drew about 1,300 A.I. experts from more than 50 countries to Vienna’s Hofburg palace this week, will not return in 2027. The Vienna team and TED’s leadership in the United States have jointly ended their collaboration, the curator, Alina Nikolaou, announced. TEDx Vienna is currently on hold.

It marks the end of an era. The team of about 20 people led by Ms. Nikolaou and the co-founder Vlad Gozman had organized independent TEDx conferences in Vienna for years before the city won the bid in 2024 to host the first TED conference in Europe. This year’s edition was the third and the last, with speakers including the Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton and the OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger.

What Unsolved Is About

The team is not leaving the stage entirely, though. Under the name Unsolved, it is launching a new format dedicated to the unsolved problems of artificial intelligence, backed by former TEDAI Vienna speakers and partners. The format has three parts:

Database: A numbered registry of open problems in A.I., in areas such as alignment, interpretability and security, along with information on who is working on them.
Local projects: Projects on the ground, developed together with other TEDx organizers.
Flagship event: The first Unsolved conference has been announced for late September to early October 2027 in Vienna and is meant to reach a similar scale to TEDAI Vienna. The first tickets have already been sold.