PALM SPRINGS, Calif. — “I get invited to everything, and everywhere I go, everyone wishes they had my job. But that’s not true here,” said Pablos Holman, a self-described futurist and inventor who has worked on lasers that kill mosquitoes and machines that suppress hurricanes.

“There’s geniuses everywhere,” he said, motioning to the pair talking next to him, the theoretical physicist Lisa Randall and the computer scientist Stephen Wolfram. “I don’t even register on this scale.”

We’re at Mars, an exclusive three-day conference at a midcentury-modern hotel here in the California desert run by Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos, for some of the world’s most successful geeks. For its first two years, Mars was largely secret; the most prominent image that leaked was a photo of Mr. Bezos piloting a 13-foot robot last year. This year, Amazon lifted the veil and invited a handful of reporters into Mr. Bezos’s brainiac pow-wow.