Silicon Valley Hands On Programming Events

Deep learning is evolving quickly. Important new developments are appearing daily. This group attempts to keep up by reading and discussing current deep learning literature. This meetup uses discussion among the participants to speed understanding of current research results. That requires that some participants read the paper before attending. Anyone is welcome to attend and listen without reading the paper. If nobody reads the paper the meeting will be short.

Our paper for April 29, 2025:
Why do LLMs attend to the first token?
https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.02732

Papers that we're reading, code that participants generate and other random stuff can be found at github site for the group.
https://github.com/davidmacmillan/DeepLearningStudyGroup

We have a potential collaboration from Manning publications.

Looking for volunteers to function as tech leads or volunteers to lead some group projects. Dont have to be technical.

We have to define some structure which benefits Manning and the volunteer. Something that prevents being a free giveaway.

Some possible ideas include:

• Members receive special discounts on books and other content that would be of interest to them.
• Free eBook offers and exclusive chapter excerpts of upcoming titles
• Access to our authors for possible presentations or Ask Me Anything sessions
• Work through guided projects as a group
• Looking for volunteers to be tech leads or programmers(no exp required) to list meetups and work through the live projects or books
• building a LLM
  https://www.manning.com/books/build-a-large-language-model-from-scratch
• Deep Reinforcement Learning
  https://www.manning.com/books/deep-reinforcement-learning-in-action
• 5 RL classes from Coursera.

use Sebastian's YT video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quh7z1q7-uc

End of Course #1, Start of Course #2: Fundamentals of Reinforcement Learning: Bellman Equation + Optimal Policies
Review RL presentations from group members. This background is prep for individual projects in LLM fine tuning using Nemo on top of pytorch in RL

Deep learning is evolving quickly. Important new developments are appearing daily. This group attempts to keep up by reading and discussing current deep learning literature. This meetup uses discussion among the participants to speed understanding of current research results. That requires that some participants read the paper before attending. Anyone is welcome to attend and listen without reading the paper. If nobody reads the paper the meeting will be short.

TBD

Papers that we're reading, code that participants generate and other random stuff can be found at github site for the group.
https://github.com/davidmacmillan/DeepLearningStudyGroup

We have a potential collaboration from Manning publications.

Looking for volunteers to function as tech leads or volunteers to lead some group projects. Dont have to be technical.

We have to define some structure which benefits Manning and the volunteer. Something that prevents being a free giveaway.

Some possible ideas include:

• Members receive special discounts on books and other content that would be of interest to them.
• Free eBook offers and exclusive chapter excerpts of upcoming titles
• Access to our authors for possible presentations or Ask Me Anything sessions
• Work through guided projects as a group
• Looking for volunteers to be tech leads or programmers(no exp required) to list meetups and work through the live projects or books
• building a LLM
  https://www.manning.com/books/build-a-large-language-model-from-scratch
• Deep Reinforcement Learning
  https://www.manning.com/books/deep-reinforcement-learning-in-action
• 5 RL classes from Coursera.

use Sebastian's YT video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quh7z1q7-uc

End of Course #1, Start of Course #2: Fundamentals of Reinforcement Learning: Bellman Equation + Optimal Policies
Review RL presentations from group members. This background is prep for individual projects in LLM fine tuning using Nemo on top of pytorch in RL