I’m in Denver/Broomfield for a few days for the SW2con (used to be Gluecon) event. Giving a talk on Weds. meeting a bunch of old friends. https://www.sw2con.com/#agenda
#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 this issues. Some papers to read linked from the QR codes. /cc @CSLee@rstephensme
#SW2con second keynote is Datastax CTO Jonathan Ellis talking about vector databases. Very deep dive into the tech. Great to see Jonathan again… he spent the last year building open source JVector https://github.com/jbellis/jvector
#SW2con next keynote is a talk on GitHub Copilot, how it works, the development and tuning process behind getting it to work well, by Mario Rodriguez - Senior VP of Product at Microsoft.
#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 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 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 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 attending afternoon sessions related to RAG. First up: Building Something Real with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) - Jon Bratseth, CEO, Vespa.ai
#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 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.
@joy The event is in Colorado, there are people from all over the place. Hawaii, West coast, a bunch of locals, Texas, East coast and I think some from Europe.
@adrianco Yeah, the data point I'm looking for is whether or not AI topics are a focus at technical conferences (non-data science) outside of the usual hubs, e.g. SF/NYC/Paris, etc.
@joy This conference is a deliberate outlier. It’s always been whatever is the latest stuff and it’s always been held here because it’s a long way from anywhere and that acts as a filter to make people engage more.
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