PyData Leeds: Leeds Digital Festival '26

PyData Leeds: Leeds Digital Festival ’26

PyData Leeds, for the fourth time, is coming to Leeds Digital Festival!

Date: Tuesday 22nd September 2026
Time: 17:30
Location: Hippo Digital Event Space (Behind Brew Society), 26 Aire Street, Leeds, LS1 4HT

PyData is a global meet-up of Data and Software Engineering enthusiasts who want to connect, network and learn.

Leeds has a thriving and growing eco system of technology businesses and people.

The Digital Festival is an open, collaborative celebration of digital culture in all its forms.

A perfect match, right?

Agenda
17:30: Arrival, Networking and Refreshments
18:10: Welcome & Icebreaker
18:30: Event & Presentation
20:00: Wrap-up & Drinks

Presentation Details:

Lee Crossley, "The Cloud won't die. It's monopoly on intelligence might"

Cloud models have their place, but they have also become the default for almost every problem. When was the last time you tested a default?

This talk comes from Lee's tests. It makes the case for routing each job to the smallest model that passes an acceptance test on your work, considering trust boundaries but using the cloud when you can back that decision up.

The evidence is Lee's own, including a 4 bit Gemma repack running inside Overshow (a product he led, with 5 local models and a few million lines of Rust), a 27B Qwen run on a 128 GB M5 Max... and an agentic experiment that consumed more than 14 million tokens and still introduced four regressions, entirely unnecessarily.

There will be a few quick polls throughout, a live vote and hopefully time for 10 mins of questions and discussion at the end.

If you have been before, we look forward to seeing you again and if you're coming along for the first time, we're excited to meet you and for you to join the Leeds PyData Community.

Connect with us on Meetup.

PyData Leeds is a strictly professional event, as such professional behaviour is expected.

PyData Leeds is a chapter of PyData, an educational program of NumFOCUS and thus abides by the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct - https://pydata.org/code-of-conduct.html