At SpecialGuestX's AI Forum, AI Got Physical

The most popular AI at Advertising Week this year ran on a computer from 1986.

As part of Advertising Week New York, creative technology agency SpecialGuestX brought its AI Forum to the city on October 7 for an invite-only evening of conversation and hands-on experimentation. The forum held its first in-person edition at Cannes Lions earlier this year. This was its New York debut.

About 50 guests gathered at Automattic’s NoHo space, a beautiful working space rented out for the night. The crowd was creative directors, brand teams, and founders, including many designers and engineers from Google, one of SpecialGuestX’s main clients. SpecialGuestX co-hosted with SpecialGuest and 1stAveMachine. SpecialGuestX CEO Miguel Espada and SpecialGuest founder Aaron Duffy hosted the evening.

The conversations

Two speakers led the forum. Matthieu Lorrain was formerly Creative Lead for AI and Creativity Research at Google DeepMind. Raashi Rosenberger is Head of Marketing at Fauna Robotics and has held marketing roles at Meta’s Reality Labs Hardware, Google and Pinterest.

Their shared subject was making AI tangible. In their view, AI is something you experience, not just a tool you use.

That framing lands at a useful moment. As backlash against AI is growing, much of it is aimed at AI as a faceless system running in the background. A device you can hold, wear, and play with makes a different case.

One idea stuck with the room. Many of us now watch concerts through our phone screens, recording the show instead of watching it. AI devices like smart glasses could change that. If the device captures the moment, you can look up and be there. It turns the usual worry about technology around: here, the device gives people back a more human, present experience.

The devices

After the talks, the SpecialGuestX team walked the room through its devices. Then guests went back to try them for themselves.

The crowd favorite was ARGOS, a graphic adventure game running on a 1986 Compaq portable computer. Players wake up aboard a wrecked spaceship with only an AI, also called ARGOS, to help them. There is no map and no menu. You type what you want to do, and Google’s Gemini, Nano Banana and Veo generate the next scene in real time, in green-on-black 8-bit graphics true to the 1980s. Espada describes the goal as worlds “that don’t exist until we explore them.”

Bedtime AI Storymaker is a wooden toy that combines ChatGPT and ElevenLabs so families can create personalized bedtime stories. NFC sensors detect the characters in the story, an AI writes a unique tale from those inputs, and text-to-speech reads it aloud. It won a UX Design Award in 2025.

CMR-M1 is an AI-powered movie camera built with 1stAveMachine. A wheel on the side lets the operator move smoothly from the real image to AI-generated overlays. It was a winner in Fast Company’s 2025 Innovation by Design Awards.

Conway’s Arcade is an arcade machine that never plays the same game twice. Google commissioned it, and it was unveiled at NeurIPS 2025. It is built on Conway’s Game of Life and riffs on classics like Space Invaders and Breakout. Gemini generates new rules in real time.

People moved from station to station to try each one while a DJ played late into the night. The mood was excited and hands-on, more lab than trade show.

What ties the devices together is the forum’s theme. Each one pairs AI with something familiar and physical: an old computer, a wooden toy, a camera wheel, an arcade joystick. The technology is new. The way you touch it is not.

Our take

Much of the AI conversation in New York is about implementation: how to deploy, how to scale, how to measure the return. This room was different. The speakers and the crowd were focused on experimenting and creating. They cared less about rollout and more about what it is like to use the thing.

That matters for the advertising world, where this forum lives. Brands will not win people over to AI with another chatbot. They might with something people can pick up and enjoy.

ARGOS made the case best. It turned AI into a story you could step into.

The future of AI may not live in a chat window. That night in NoHo, it lived in a toy, a camera, an arcade and an old computer, and everyone wanted a turn.

Thanks to SpecialGuestX, SpecialGuest and 1stAveMachine for hosting the night. Explore their work at the links.