Julien Simon

Keynote presentation at AI Dev TLV conference on Small Language Models and the future of enterprise AI. Discussed practical strategies for implementing cost-effective, privacy-first AI solutions using open-weights models that deliver superior performance at scale.

Featured guest on Analytics Vidhya's "Leading With Data" podcast with Kunal Jain. Discussed journey from early computer fascination to becoming Chief Evangelist at Hugging Face, the role of evangelism in AI companies, why cutting-edge tools aren't always the best solution for real-world problems, the importance of open-source LLMs, techniques for explaining complex technologies simply, focusing on core customer problems, and predictions for industry-leading open-source LLMs and local inference.

Technical session on leveraging Small Language Models (SLMs) with the open-source Mergekit library to create high-quality domain-specific models that rival larger counterparts. The session covers the benefits of SLMs as foundation models, comprehensive understanding of model merging process, popular algorithms in Mergekit, and how merging fits into the larger workflow of language model development between pre-training and alignment.

Technical session focusing on practical techniques for using small open-source language models (SLMs) for real-life projects. Covers limitations of proprietary models in terms of privacy, compliance, and cost, modern workflows for adapting SLMs with domain-specific pre-training, instruction fine-tuning, and alignment. Demonstrates open-source Arcee AI SLM and libraries like DistillKit, Spectrum, and MergeKit for optimizing task-specific accuracy while reducing computational costs. Explores advanced scenarios like model routing and agentic workflows where SLMs excel.

Deep dive workshop on AWS generative AI services and implementation strategies, providing hands-on experience with AWS generative AI tools and best practices for enterprise deployment.

Fireside chat between Julien Simon, co-founder of Hugging Face, and Stephan Hadinger, CTO AWS France, at the 50 Day event organized by 50partnersFr on March 7, 2024. Discussion covering the latest developments in Hugging Face's open source AI models and how they enhance Amazon Bedrock offerings. A fascinating dive into the promising world of AI accessible to everyone.

Featured session at DataCamp Radar AI discussing the future of open source AI ecosystem and Hugging Face's role in democratizing AI. Explored how open source models are transforming the AI landscape and making advanced AI technologies accessible to developers worldwide.

Technical session on deploying accelerator-agnostic inference pipelines using Amazon EKS for scalable AI applications. Demonstrated practical approaches for building flexible, scalable inference systems that can work across different hardware accelerators.

Local AI meetup presentation in Austin, Texas on artificial intelligence topics.

Presentation at Open Data Science Conference East on data science and machine learning.

Summit presentation on generative AI technologies and applications.

Keynote presentation on how open-source models can help develop high-quality AI applications, both generative and non-generative, while offering more flexibility, control, and ROI than closed-model APIs. Highlighted the latest and most powerful models and demonstrated how to test them in minutes, along with the technical ecosystem that Hugging Face is fostering, from models and datasets to cloud integrations and hardware acceleration.

Local meetup presentation on generative AI technologies and applications.

Festival presentation on artificial intelligence trends and developments at the prestigious World AI Cannes Festival, showcasing the latest innovations and insights in the AI industry.

Recap presentation of AWS re:Invent announcements and new features for the Irish market.

Virtual summit presentation on AI development and implementation strategies.