July 16 - Paris AI, ML and Computer Vision Meetup

Hear talks from experts on cutting-edge topics in AI, ML, and computer vision!

Register for the event to reserve your seat.

When and Where

July 16
5:30-8:30 PM

Paris Marriott Opera Ambassador
Drouot Meeting Room
16 Bd Haussmann

Building and working with Small Language Models

This session focuses on practical techniques for using small open-source language models (SLMs) in enterprise settings. We'll explore modern workflows for adapting SLMs with domain-specific pre-training, instruction fine-tuning, and alignment. Along the way, we will introduce and demonstrate open-source tools such as DistillKit, Spectrum, and MergeKit, which implement advanced techniques crucial for achieving task-specific accuracy while optimizing computational costs. We'll also discuss some of the models and solutions built by Arcee AI. Join us to learn how small, efficient, and adaptable models can transform your AI applications.

About the Speaker

Julien Simon, the Chief Evangelist at Arcee.ai, is dedicated to helping enterprise clients develop top-notch and cost-efficient AI solutions using small language models. With over 30 years of tech experience, including more than a decade in cloud computing and machine learning, Julien is committed to daily learning and is passionate about sharing his expertise through code demos, blogs, and YouTube videos. Before joining Arcee.ai, he was Chief Evangelist at Hugging Face and Global AI Evangelist at Amazon Web Services. He also served as a CTO at prominent startups.

Accelerating sustainable inference with Pruna AI

This talk explores how to make AI faster and more sustainable. We’ll look at the high costs and carbon impact of fine-tuning and self deploying models, and show how optimization techniques available in the Pruna library can reduce size and latency with little to no quality loss.

About the Speaker

Gabriel Tregoat is the software lead at Pruna.ai, a specialist company on model inference optimisation with an open source library called “pruna”. He previously was a leader for AI in production at Ekimetrics, and started his career as a data scientist and ml-engineer at Shell Energy. He’s passionate about tech, code and new technologies.

Visual Agents: What it takes to build an agent that can navigate GUIs like humans

We’ll examine conceptual frameworks, potential applications, and future directions of technologies that can “see” and “act” with increasing independence. The discussion will touch on both current limitations and promising horizons in this evolving field.

About the Speaker

Harpreet Sahota is a hacker-in-residence and machine learning engineer with a passion for deep learning and generative AI. He’s got a deep interest in RAG, Agents, and Multimodal AI.

What I Learned About Systematic AI Improvement

Most AI teams go through the same story: fast early progress, and then suddenly things slow down. The AI isn’t broken, but new changes don’t seem to help, and it’s not even clear how to tell if things are getting better. I’ve faced this plateau myself—both in my own work and while helping other teams. In this talk, I’ll share what I’ve learned about getting unstuck: how to build genuine confidence in your AI, what “trust” really means in practice, and practical steps to move from “it kind of works” to “this is actually improving.” My goal is to give you real-world ideas you can use when you hit the same wall.

About the Speaker

Louis Dupont is an AI engineer with over eight years of experience developing AI solutions across multiple industries. Currently, he work directly with companies to build and deploy AI internally, and as a consultant specializing in helping teams overcome common roadblocks in AI development.