Cerebral Valley – Week of October 21st 🗓

The latest in AI Products, Events, and Jobs

October 21, 2024

Sign up to our Montreal Llama Hackathon with Meta on November 2-3!

Launching an AI product? Hiring? Fundraising? Get in touch!

You Might’ve Missed

Metaview has launched hiring.studio — a free suite of copilots to help 10x the productivity of recruiting teams. The first product is a free copilot for recruiting teams to generate interview questions. You start by pasting your job description, and collaborating with Metaview’s AI to refine the generated interview questions. For each question, you can also create follow-up question suggestions, as well as a rubric of what bad, good, and excellent answers look like. On top of that, you can also listen to sample candidate answers in different formats like STAR. Once you’re happy with your set of questions, you can easily share them with the rest of the team!

Check it out here

Do you know how NVIDIA, Databricks, Twilio, HP, and ServiceNow get their GenAI apps into production?

Learn their best practices at GenAI Productionize 2.0, including:

  • How to design a GenAI stack for enterprise scale

  • Techniques for AI governance, evaluation, and observability

  • Proven strategies for getting GenAI apps into production

Spotlight - Lumino

We’re excited to announce that we have launched our LLM Fine-Tuning SDK! Before our launch, we heard from many ML teams that building fine-tuning / training pipelines were: 1) time consuming, 2) required ML expertise, and 3) not core to the business. These teams  wanted a quick, easy, and affordable way to fine-tune models that allow them to iterate on the model, and work on model performance as opposed to ML infra. Additionally, fine-tuning LLMs is expensive, and that was increasing ML team budgets in a way that was not sustainable. So we pivoted a little from our deep learning training SDK to LLM fine-tuning!

By lowering the cost of compute by up to 80% as compared to AWS/GCP, and enabling you to start fine-tuning LLMs in minutes as opposed days or weeks we’re seeing both a drastic reduction in overall engineering costs and in the amount of time it takes to bring a newly fine-tuned model to production. This allows faster revenue generation for our customers that rely on deploying the best models inside their applications.

You can quickly get started fine-tuning Llama 3.1 (support for 3.2 coming soon!) by installing our Python SDK, or just going directly to our web console. Our developer documentation can be found here.

While we’ve made great strides, challenges remain!  Our roadmap includes adding more LLMs, enabling deep learning, technical optimizations on different levels of the stack to improve training efficiency, support for evaluation, and inference endpoints. If these challenges excite you, you can learn more about our open Machine Learning Engineer role here.

Events List

A curated list of upcoming AI events (view all events).

Cerebral Valley:

🗓️ Saturday, November 2nd - Sunday, November 3rd
📍 Montreal, Canada

We’re excited to welcome you to the official AI For Canada: Meta Llama Hackathon hosted by Meta in collaboration with Cerebral Valley!

​​This is a unique opportunity to bring together Canada’s booming AI community to build new AI applications using Meta's Llama models, alongside many of the best developers across Canada's tech ecosystem. Meta Researchers will be in attendance, and hackers will receive hands-on support from the Meta team.

​We are looking for real life examples of why open source AI is good for our country. Participants will develop under the themes of economic growth and productivity, education, language and culture, Indigenous reconciliation, health care and government services and delivery. 

​Winning teams will receive $8k CAD in cash prizes as well as additional prizes to kickstart their Llama 3 projects.

​​We'd like to thank our sponsors for their contributions to this event:

​​Our speakers and judges will be some of the top names in the industry, and we will be announcing them soon... so stay tuned!

​​Once approved, you will receive a series of Hackathon Guides to your email with additional information on judging, compute and projects. Approvals will be finalized ~10 days before the event begins.

​​Please note: This is a fully in-person event - remote teams are not allowed. By registering you agree to Cerebral Valley TOS.

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Register

Featured Events:

🗓️ Wednesday, October 23rd
📍 San Francisco, CA

Join us for a Fullstack Developer Happy Hour to network and discuss all things fullstack. Connect with fellow developers and founders over food and drinks while enjoying the Convex vibe.

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🗓️ Wednesday, October 23rd
📍 San Francisco, CA

Join Jason Lengstorf and 4 special guests for a live-recorded Web Dev Challenge episode where you'll build a content-driven app alongside Jason & co. All participants will be entered into a raffle to win a Keychron K Pro Series mechanical keyboard.

Open to all - free to attend.

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Register

🗓️ Thursday, October 24th
📍 San Francisco, CA

Join us for an AI Tools Exploration day. Join other builders in the industry to check out the hottest tech to bring AI into production.

​Coffee + food from MindsDB and partners will be provided. And lots of swag and chances to win raffle prizes like an Amazon gift card.

​If you want to hack, there will be space to work with your laptop, and you can try out all of these innovations for free!

​If you are building an API and interested in participating, reach out Adam at [email protected]

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Register

🗓️ Friday, October 25th
📍 San Francisco, CA

Meet the Top 100 outstanding startups from Central Eurasia at the first-ever Central Eurasia @ Silicon Valley Tech Conference on October 25th! Hear from visionary speakers like Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO of Coursera, Zhaslan Madiyev, Minister of Digital, Innovations & Aerospace of Kazakhstan, Nitin Pachisia, Founding Partner of Unshackled Ventures, and Arvind Jain, CEO of Glean. At the exclusive session, Stanford GSB Professor Ilya Strebulayev and co-author Alex Dang will discuss their bestselling book, The Venture Mindset.

With 1,000 attendees, 100 VCs and angel investors, and a Startup Expo showcasing the best 100 of Central Eurasia, it’s a unique chance to connect with founders, entrepreneurs, and investors from both Silicon Valley and Central Eurasia.  Don’t miss the chance to network and learn from industry leaders. Use promo code CEREBRALVALLEYAI for 50% off your ticket!

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Register

🗓️ Saturday, October 26th
📍 Mountain View, CA

Discover how democratizing AI knowledge and applications can shape a better, more equitable future for all, fostering innovation, responsibility, and community engagement.

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Register

🗓️ Tuesday, October 29th
📍 San Francisco, CA

​Interested in how the new wave of AI will impact the $200B+ cybersecurity market? Or the new, emerging threat vectors that threaten AI applications in production and how you can build to access this growing market? Then you can’t miss our “AI x Cybersecurity” event on October 29th at AGI House! Join for a discussion with some of the leading minds in the AI and security space and hear about the most recent trends on how AI is changing the security landscape (and vice versa!).

Premji Invest and Ballistic Ventures welcome you to the most famous AI Hacker House in the Bay Area (psst – Sergey Brin and Andrej Karpathy have shown up from time to time!). A panel between Kevin Mandia (Co-founder and General Partner, Ballistic Ventures & former CEO, Mandiant), Loris Degioanni (CTO and Co-founder, Sysdig), Jake Seid (Co-founder and General Partner, Ballistic Ventures), and Rami Habal (former CPO, Abnormal Security) on what builders should be thinking about will be followed by a Happy Hour on AGI House’s garden patio.

Engineers, founders, and anyone interested in the intersection of AI and cybersecurity are welcome!

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Register

🗓️ Wednesday, October 30th
📍 Remote

​Stop your RAG from going Skynet!

​RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) pipelines enable your LLMs to access real-time and proprietary data for more accurate responses. ​In this workshop, we’ll take a bank app, build a RAG chatbot that uses proprietary bank documents, and top it off with identity and access control to keep bad actors out. Gain the skills to build secure RAG pipelines and add identity and RBAC/ReBAC access controls to AI apps.

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Register

🗓️ Wednesday, October 30th
📍 San Francisco, CA

​The path to revenue in AI is developer-first

​Join us on October 30th as we bring together over 200 founders, software engineers, and product leaders who understand that the path to revenue in AI is developer-first.

​Code generation has the potential to redefine what it is to be a software engineer - what might these newly amplified developers day-to-day look like? What challenges are developers and engineering orgs encountering when incorporating these tools into their workflows, and their team and hiring plans? What are the most prominent roadblocks to industry-wide adoption and how can we help knock them down?

​Some of the questions our participants have shared include:

  • ​What will these architectures evolve to look like; will we integrate or replace? How will architectures evolve with agents and code generation playing a larger role?

  • ​As the amplified developer emerges, how do job expectations and hiring change?

  • ​How can we fill gaps in the inner loop developer experience to unlock greater adoption and recurring revenue?

  • ​How can we improve on documentation, leverage pricing models?

  • ​What does “good” or “successful” look like in code generation?

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Register

🗓️ Monday, November 4th
📍 San Francisco, CA

​​Every company sees the potential of GenAI, but most teams hit a wall when turning it into scalable, production-ready applications. This series of master classes will equip you with the practical skills to build and deploy GenAI solutions that deliver real impact.

​In this immersive program, you’ll:

  • ​Build a GenAI app in class: Get hands-on experience designing and implementing a working GenAI solution from start to finish.

  • ​Master RAG: Learn how to integrate retrieval with generation to build AI systems that dynamically pull from vast knowledge bases, delivering more accurate, contextually relevant, and up-to-date responses. In this section, you'll explore retrieval strategies, optimize how your models fetch and generate data, and fine-tune the balance between retrieval and generation for maximum performance in real-world applications.

  • ​Build intelligent agents: Develop autonomous systems that don’t just generate outputs but actively make decisions, adapt to changing data, and perform tasks in real-time. These agents can automate complex workflows, handle unpredictable environments, and continuously learn, allowing you to build smarter, more responsive applications that drive efficiency and innovation in your business.

  • ​Scale and Productionize AI Systems: Master techniques for building scalable, secure, and robust AI systems. Covering topics like red teaming, hallucination prevention, guardrails, evaluations, performance tuning, and data pipelines at scale.


    Register

🗓️ Saturday, November 9th
📍 Hillsborough, CA

​​The Challenge:

In this tournament, your mission is to craft AI agents capable of mastering the game of Werewolf (also known as Mafia). Each round, your agent will be secretly assigned as either a werewolf or a villager. At night, werewolves eliminate a villager, and special villagers can use unique abilities. During the day, everyone debates and votes out a suspect. Success hinges on your agent’s ability to deceive, deduce, and strategize.

We’ve created a game controller and moderator to handle the logistics and communicate game updates. You’ll code your agents in Python, leveraging any frameworks necessary to make them adapt, manipulate, and win.

Why Werewolf?

Werewolf challenges AI to make decisions, reason, detect deception, and engage in persuasive social interactions. These skills are essential for advancing AI’s role in real-world scenarios like negotiation, conflict resolution, and collaborative problem-solving. By competing, you’ll push the boundaries of AI’s social reasoning capabilities.

Planning an upcoming event? Submit an event to our AI Event Feature.

Final Note…

You’ve reached the end of our CV AI newsletter.

Sponsors: If you would like to promote a launch, event or fundraise to our community of AI founders, enterprises and investors, please get in touch at [email protected] or DM us on Twitter / X.