Open Intelligence Summit: Hands-On Workshop Day
Kick off the Open Intelligence Summit by building.
The day before the main Open Intelligence Summit conference, join MLH and DigitalOcean at The Midway for a hands-on workshop day. You'll ship real projects with open-weight models and open-source infrastructure, not sit through slides.
What you'll build
Deploy an AI agent on your own infrastructure. Stand up a Nous Research Hermes agent on DigitalOcean.
Route across models. Use DigitalOcean's model router to balance cost, latency and quality across open models.
Go off-script with open weights. Pick a model, fine-tune or serve it, and make it do something useful for your stack.
You'll start with live demos, then choose your own path while MLH mentors and technical experts work with you at your table.
Why open intelligence, why now
The question for AI teams isn't whether open models are cheaper. It's who owns the intelligence your product runs on. The Open Intelligence Summit brings together the builders, founders and researchers pushing to keep AI portable, interoperable and under your control.
Workshop Day is where that becomes practical. Every session maps to one layer of the open stack:
Build: make intelligence your own with open weights and your own data
Serve: take control of inference costs and performance
Run: own the agents and experiences your users touch
The main summit follows on October 13, with speakers from Nous Research, Hugging Face, OpenHands, NVIDIA, DigitalOcean and more. Learn about the summit →
Schedule · Monday, October 12
9:00 AM · Doors open: check in, grab a seat and get your laptop set up
10:00 AM · Live demos: a quick tour of the open stack you'll build on
10:45 AM · Hands-on build: pick your path and start shipping, with mentors at your table
12:00 PM · Lunch on The Midway rooftop: meet the people building in open AI
12:45 PM · Keep building
2:00 PM · Wrap up: Head out ready for the summit
Who should come
The OIS Workshop Day is built for people already shipping with AI:
Founders and technical leads deciding what their AI stack should look like
Engineers building with open-weight models, inference infrastructure or agents
Researchers working on post-training, serving or agent tooling
Seats are limited and every registration is reviewed. Tell us what you're building so we can make sure the room is full of people you'll want to meet.
Before you arrive
Bring your laptop and charger. There's power at every seat.
Create a DigitalOcean account ahead of time. It means less setup and more building.
Have a Hugging Face and a GitHub account ready. You'll pull open models and push your work.
Watch your inbox. Approved attendees will get setup instructions a few days before the event.
No prior experience with any specific tool is needed. If you've shipped code, you'll be fine.