Open weights, real stakes

Meet-up overview

Recent requests by the Indian government to avoid gold imports highlight how vulnerable India is to its dependence on U.S. dollars for imports. We already depend on other countries for oil and gold. Can we afford to also increase our dependence on foreign models? NVIDIA recently announced RTX Spark, a one-of-a-kind reinvention of the Windows laptop that supports 120B parameter local model inference. Is the future local?

To answer some of these questions, we can look at the experiences of practitioners who have shipped with Open Weights and/or local models.

Featured talks

Kanav Dwevedi (The FlyWheel) on how far can you get without fine-tuning: quality as architecture
This talk is a deep dive on building architecture and guardrails around self-hosted open-weight models (Gemma 4) to deliver quality. The FlyWheel runs a production LLM helpline for Gujarati dairy farmers (phone-line and chat) answering questions on animal health, breeding, milk, and schemes, on open-weight models we host ourselves.

More talks to be announced soon.

Who should attend

• Engineers and developers building with open weight models
• Data scientists who’ve fine-tuned or evaluated open weight LLMs
• Technical founders shipping AI products outside the big labs API ecosystem
• Practitioners working on Indian language models or regional use cases
• Anyone tired of vendor lock-in and looking for real alternatives

Meet the editorial team

Craig - AI Automations Engineer, Freelance
Kiran - Founder, Unravel.tech
Sitaram - Site Reliability Engineer, NVIDIA

How to attend

This is a free meet-up. Hit register to attend.

Thank you to our venue hosts

Thank you to Sarang Kulkarni from The Fifth Elephant Community and Darshana Radhakrishnan for supporting the meet-up by hosting it at Thoughtworks Pune. Thank you for helping bring the community together.

Need more info?

☎️ Call: (91) 7676332020
📧 Email: info@hasgeek.com