Yesterday was Boston Azure AI’s Edition of the Global AI Bootcamp at the NERD in Cambridge.
We had a lot of interest in the event - 85 people on the RSVP list and almost that on the waitlist. Since the space we had couldn’t handle any more people, unfortunately we couldn’t let more people in. However since there was such good interest in a Saturday AI oriented bootcamp, we are working on planning another one soon - so if you happen to be one of those people that couldn’t attend - stay tuned!
This year we only had one challenge with the facilities … lack of power strips. Thanks to Rich Crane and Mill 5 for getting a bunch of power strips at the last minute for us!
Also a big thanks to Daymark for providing the breakfast and lunch - they were really good and received well by the attendees.
We had a full roster of sessions - 8 total speakers (1 keynote speaker, 5 presentations with workshops and 2 lightening talks).
My session was the last of the day.
Talk: Getting Started with Local Models
I presented Getting Started with Local Models and discussed ONNX runtime, LM Studio and Ollama. There were a lot of questions around LM Studio, CPU, Memory, GPU, and all the other challenges that come with running an AI model on your laptop.
The presentation pdf can be downloaded here
Lab: Build a Chainlit App using Ollama and Phi 4
Once I got to the lab, Build a Chainlit App using Ollama and Phi 4 since it was the end of the day and I think every one was drained of energy so I walked through the solutions showing how fast Chainlit helps you get a web application talking with an LLM. The great thing about the local models are - they can do the labs at any time and not worry about having to pay for an Azure subscription, etc.
It was great to see some faces I hadn’t seen in awhile and nice to meet a bunch of new people.
If you have a comment, please message me @haleyjason on twitter/X.