Tarus Balog has been involved in managing communications networks professionally since 1988, and unprofessionally since 1978 when he got his first computer - a TRS-80 from Radio Shack. After being kicked out of some of the best colleges in the country, and a short stint in telecom, he founded an open source-focused company and ran it for twenty years. Once that company was sold, he started working at Amazon Web Services with the goal of making AWS the most welcoming place to run open source workloads.

Presentations

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The Role of Open Source in Generative AI

There has been a lot of confusion about the role of open source in generative AI, as the focus has been mainly on Large Language Models (LLMs) and whether or not those models meet the definition of "open source".

But like most emerging technology in the past twenty years, open source software will form the basis for getting the most value out of generative AI. From vector databases to inference engines to the "chunking" of data for consumption by Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), the role of open source can not be overstated.

This talk will present some interesting open source projects that exist in tandem with LLMs to extract the most value from LLMs and giving users greater control over their data.

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