The Fifth Elephant 2024 Annual Conference (12th &13th July)

Hello folks on this fine Saturday morning from Bangalore. I am Bharat Shetty, part of the editorial team for Fifthel 2024. The conference is next Saturday, 13 July, at the Bangalore International Centre (BIC), Domlur. It also has a few hands-on workshops on Friday, 12th July.

This year’s team consists of 8 editors across two tracks - data engineering and infrastructure; and GenAI and LLMs in business. Sharing some highlights of the conf, and my favourite bits, so that you can sign up for some of these sessions too!

1. Workshops are on 12 July - both online and at The Underline Centre (Indiranagar). I am looking forward to Sid’s LLMs finetuning workshop which is online, and then Romit Jain’s workshop on Triton. These workshops will are geared towards optimising LLM training, understanding the fine-tuning of models and also learning how to speed up inference by understanding GPUs and LLM architectures. You will also be able to deep dive into GPU programming using Triton and knowledge of kernels subsequently and then enter the world of mat muls.

2. Soma Dhavala has put together an excellent AMA session at the Conference(on 13 July) on Building and Deploying LLM Applications: From Concept to Production. The AMA is curated to have industry experts who have been part of multiple stages of LLM app cycle. One can get insights on what to do and what not to do when deploying LLMs for various gen-ai use cases.

3. I’m also looking forward to these talks:
   The winter of our discontent: content moderation systems at scale by Nikhil Ketkar, Google.
   Leveraging Llama.lisp for constructing compiler frameworks by Sasank Chilamkurthy, founder and CEO at Von Neumann AI.
   From pair programming to piloting: building independent AI data analysts by Karthik Shashidhar, co-founder at Babbage Insight.
   Unfreeze your data markets with privacy-preserving DPI by Gaurav Aggarwal, AI/ML at Jio Platforms Limited.

4. Lastly, I am very happy with the peer review and curation of all the talks in the GenAI and LLMs track. The use cases for GenAI application range from space-tech, to food delivery at Zomato, to mental health and AI. There is also a Gen-AI startup showcase in the end which gives opportunities to demo features and exciting things for startups and companies leveraging Gen-AI in some of their products and platforms. You will also be able to learn about some fundamental technologies that are relevant to Gen-AI such as Graph RAG, and Vector DBs as well as gaining insights on data engineering, orchestration, curation and applying ethical and responsible AI standards around the stuff you are building.

You will have a hard time making choices at the Conference (and for the workshops on 12 July). But worry not! The talks will be video recorded so that you can catch up after the conference, and we will continue to have engagement through comments and online interactions.

See you all next week!