Building *and* Using LLMs in Ruby

September marked the resumption of ScotRUG in person meetups. It was great to see so many faces new and old! As the light continues to fade from the sky, and thoughts turn to the cooler days of the year, it’s time to look forward to our October meet up. Meetups aren’t all ScotRUG is about, but it is great to talk to folks in person. If you're coming along for the second time, bring someone new with you!

So: what's up this month?

There is a lot of chatter about AI right now. Since Google's Transformer paper Attention is All You Need was published in 2017, research focus on Large Language Models (LLMs) has been intense. And then: obscene amounts of money and overly reactive marketing

However, investment has lead to a number of interesting products, which offer more approaches to some programming tasks, and to features that programs can offer. Let's look at this through a Ruby lens.

This month's talks are brought to us by the fine people of RubyNess

First up, we have Gavin Morrice, who promises “How to build an LLM from scratch in Ruby”

Secondly, we have Sergey Sergyenko, who will talk about how to use an LLM from your Ruby programs.

And finally, bring your laptops! Sergey wants to chat to people about their programming environments, and encourage everyone to share tips.