Build + Voice + Aha!!!

This month's event is going to focus on Building. While it's super-interesting to observe what's going on in the wider world of AI, nothing beats rolling up ones sleeves and actually building a thing!

Talks:

"The A-ha Moment" - Martin Andrews

In the wake of last months' reveal of R1-Zero by DeepSeek (i.e. how an LLM can learn to reason using a Reinforcement Learning method that was hiding in plain sight), there have been several replications made with small models (and more modest tasks). Martin will talk about what is required in "Getting to Aha" with a (very) limited budget.

"Domesticate the beast" - Florian Kowarsch

In his lightning talk, Florian will give an overview of common practices for prompt evaluation that help you control the behavior of your LLM in a production environment : From evaluating deterministic outputs in classification tasks to handling subjective criteria like creativity and precision.

"Building Voice bots both local and not" - Sam Witteveen

In this talk, Sam will cover how you can build a variety of different kinds of voice bots from the past through to latest examples, making use both of local models running on your laptop or desktop, right through to using the latest Gemini models to create bi-directional conversational experiences.

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Talks will start at 7:00pm and end at around 8:45pm, at which point people normally come up to the front for a bit of a chat with each other, and the speakers.

As always, we're actively looking for more speakers - both '30 minutes long-form', and lightning talks. For the lightning talks, we welcome folks to come and talk about something cool they've done with keras, PyTorch, JAX and/or Deep Learning for 5-10mins (so, if you have slides, then #max=10). We believe that the key ingredient for the success of a Lightning Talk is simply the cool/interesting factor. It doesn't matter whether you're an expert or an enthusiastic beginner: Given the responses we have had to previous talks, we're sure there are lots of people who would love to hear what you've been playing with. If you're interested in talking, please just introduce yourself to Martin at one of the events.