Building Stuff with GenAI - The Open Minded Workshop beyond OpenAI

Join me to get up to speed to the right-now in the brave new world of Generative AI for an accessible Zero to… Hero (in training) and look beyond the story the major cloud vendors promote.

In four segments we aim to grasp the current state of Generative AI from a hands-on perspective with an independent mindset.

Segment 1: Foundations - Concepts and APIs. Together we are tracing the steps on the journey to today’s models and how to interact with them. You will learn about the lifecycle of a model from “pre-training” to the models that you finally get to interact with including what’s in the model or what’s rather an abstracted away PaaS offering on top and what building blocks you work with in the APIs and SDKs

Segment 2: Integrating AI Focusing on how to enable your applications, we are looking at the various concepts such as embedding vectors, RAG, tool-calls, skills, plugins, frameworks, to help with that. We will discuss engineering context, how to work with larger documents and content sources to make them accessible by AI models with a mix of technologies.

Segment 3: The world of agents Starting with very simple agents, we will effectively leverage AI in an agentic world, meaning, how to have agents do work for you, up to deploying larger teams of agents on complex tasks. This segment description is intentional vague as there is rapid innovation in this space.

Segment 4: Local AI, media content, and AI beyond the Western corporate world You may prefer to run AI locally on your own devices. Utilizing tools such as ollama, LM Studio, Azure AI Foundry Local, and other alternatives, we aim to make them accessible to your apps. We explore the wild model zoo that becomes available by going beyond the big cloud vendors including generating images, video, speech, music, more. Some extra attention is awarded to tools from Chinese AI labs and how you can mix-and-match different capabilities for interesting workflows.