Own Your AI: Build Your First Model Factory - Hacknight Seattle
Build a Sovereign AI Factory: an ML Engineer Agent that evaluates, fine-tunes, deploys, and improves open models.
The best AI teams aren't renting every capability from an external API, they're building systems they own and control. In this hands-on session at the Union HQ, we'll build exactly that.
We'll start with a walkthrough where we build an agent that evaluates open models in parallel, fine-tunes promising candidates, deploys the winner, and retrains automatically when performance drops. Think of it as the first brick in your own model factory: a repeatable system for evaluating, improving, and deploying models you control.
You'll see how Union.ai & Flyte give your AI workflows a durable runtime with infrastructure as context, so agents adapt infra resources, recover from failures, and keep moving without re-running completed work. And because it all runs in your own cloud, you own the full stack end to end: your models, your data, your infrastructure, your IP.
Then we switch into hack night mode: keep building on the example, bring your own models or datasets, experiment with evals and fine-tuning, extend open models to different parts of your agent, or start something new around the same ideas.
There are no judges, no prizes, and no required tools. The goal is to learn something, build something, and meet other people working on AI.
For teams thinking about sovereign AI, this is a practical starting point for owning more of your stack, the weights, the training loop, the evals, and the infrastructure it runs on, all on AWS.
Bring a laptop. Leave with a model factory.
Flyte: https://flyte.org/
Union: https://www.union.ai/
Schedule
5:30–6:00 PM
Arrive, grab food, meet people, talk AI
6:00–7:00 PM
Topic introduction + practical demo & topic discussion
7:00–8:00 PM
Build, experiment, collaborate, and learn
8:00–8:30 PM
Optional project demos + continue community discussion
Come build AI together.