#sw2con — Public Fediverse posts

#SW2con final thoughts. It’s a small event, doesn’t have crowds of attendees but with great content and hallway track it has enough to be worth it. I plan to be back next year. There were about as many people as last year’s Gluecon, although there have been much bigger Gluecon events in the past decade or so.

#SW2con had fun presenting my talk, and finished on time! Too much content - this is one of the talks where I “didn’t have time to write a shorter talk” as the saying goes.

#SW2con I’m up next - Thanks for the Memory - looking at recent changes in GPU architectures and the implications of that. Some thoughts on Enterprise Indigestion - as the pace of change in AI is too fast for most enterprises to consume. Also asking for advice/help with my meGPT idea. https://github.com/adrianco/meGPT

#SW2con Matthew Fields CEO of VMAccel talking about AI moving to the edge. In my opinion this is happening, but it’s in addition to growth in centralized AI not instead of it.

#SW2con Talk was short and could have gone into a lot more technical depth, there was some good Q&A afterwards.

#SW2con Marc Austin of Hedgehog talking about why AI needs a new network. Discussing Ethernet based solutions prior to the move to the high speed Ultra Ethernet Consortium vs. using Infiniband.

#SW2con Rob Zuber CTO of CircleCI talks about how to detect AI hallucinations.

#SW2con interview between Heather Joslyn of The New Stack and Paige Bailey of Google - discussing some of the new Google AI announcements and other recent news.

#SW2con Day 2 kicks off with Sriram Subramanian of CloudDon talking about building responsible AI systems. Good discussion of the differences between alternative ethical frameworks and how each LLM interprets them.

#SW2con Final keynote of the day with Paul Kedrosky - a fun talk looking at what’s going on with AI as more capabilities emerge.

#SW2con Refining RAG Performance - Chris Maddock, Head of Product Marketing & Solutions Architecture, Unstructured.io. Open source and commercial versions.

@jawnsy You’re welcome, there’s other people tooting with #SW2con as well (and people who are seeing too much of it and don’t care can mute that tag).

#SW2con I took a break to work on my talk for tomorrow (I’m the keynote before lunch) and now we are back for the final set of day 1 keynotes with: KAITO: Building an Open Source Platform for AI - Lachlan Evenson, Principal PDM Manager, Microsoft Azure. Good advice on how open models work, nice demo of Kubernetes deployment and some next steps.

#SW2con when to do fine tuning vs RAG. Useful talk by Jesse Kipp on the differences and techniques.

#SW2con A Recipe for Fine-tuning with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) - Jesse Kipp, Director of Engineering, Cloudflare - good reference to a recent paper http://arxiv.org/abs/2405.00732

#SW2con Joe Shockman co-founder of Grounded AI up next. Goal of making today’s workloads more efficient and avoiding the pitfalls we’ve been seeing.

#SW2con more advice on RAG from Jon Bratseth - good level of detail on how they work and what’s important.

#SW2con attending afternoon sessions related to RAG. First up: Building Something Real with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) - Jon Bratseth, CEO, Vespa.ai

#SW2con Code Assistants - the road ahead. Measure user feedback, pick the right context, combine LLMs with established techniques, go beyond coding.

#SW2con Intent matters a lot, the flow of how it works is shown… the IBM example was turning COBOL into Java, unlike the earlier GitHub examples in Python and Cody examples in JavaScript. They can all do most languages but for a specific use case and language one or the other products is likely to be better tuned.

#SW2con IBM Fellow Trent Grey-Donald talking in detail about how code assistants work. I was chatting to Trent last night and discovered we have a bunch of friends in common. The hallway track here is very good, I usually meet some new interesting people…

#SW2con good talk on what to think about when considering AI trust and security issues.

#SW2con Dennis Pilarinos, CEO of Unblocked taking about security and trust for AI apps. Applying these patterns to the new AI apps.

#SW2con next up I’m in the Code-assists track hearing from Aso Kukic of Sourcegraph about their Cody tool. Start by defining levels of Code AI assist. Human-initiated, AI initiated, and AI led.

#SW2con Emily Johnson from IBM - first time speaker - doing a great job talking about observability with Instana and optimization with Turbonomic. I was an advisor to Instana when they started, and it’s good to see IBM developing and supporting the product after they acquired the team.

#SW2con started out with an excellent keynote from the #RedMonk analyst team, the intersection of developers and AI, how we got here and what are the issues. Some papers to read linked from the QR codes. /cc @CSLee @rstephensme

Kicking off #sw2con with three of the #RedMonk analysts (@rstephensme is my favorite one)