AI Realist: AI Without Hype

Registration: https://airealist.org/workshops/ai-stack/

In 3 hours you learn to: audit your AI stack, understand the trade-offs between local models and public APIs, optimise your AI costs — and put it all into practice across 4 real-world challenges.

What You'll Leave With

• Every participant leaves with a clear mental model of the modern AI stack and the confidence to make better decisions with it from day one.

How the Modern AI Stack Works

A clear understanding of what makes up today's AI stack — from model providers and APIs to local inference and orchestration layers.

Token Economy & How Models Are Billed

Understand how tokens work, how costs are calculated, and why the same task can cost 10x more depending on the model and approach you choose.

Price, Quality & Privacy Trade-offs

Know what you're giving up when you optimise for cost — and how to make informed trade-offs between performance, data privacy and price across providers.

The Right Model for the Right Task

A practical framework for matching tasks to models — so you stop using a €20/month flagship for things a free or cheap model handles just as well.