Dec Meetup - AI
This is the tentative date. Actual date will be confirmed in Oct/Nov.
Welcome back to our meetup in December. (If this is your first time coming to the venue, please scroll down to the bottom to find the instructions for getting to the venue.)
06:00 PM Registration, dinner, networking
06:30 PM Talk starts
If you want to have practical AI Agents that can productively search and find relevant rich content for you, this event is for you.
Dinner will be actual food, with real protein like actual beef or chicken, not random baloney pizza.
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Other community news:
1. We are also planning to hold a social Pickleball event in Jun/Jul/Aug sponsored and open to previous attendees of previous community events. A separate invite and event page will be sent out later.
2. If you would like to follow our future events, but you are unable to make for this specific event but you would like to attend a future event: Just keep your status as "Invited" without registering and do not select "Not Going" because the Luma platform drops the "Not Going" people from future event invitations. Unfortunately the Luma platform handles it in a way that is counterintuitive to common sense.
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Talk 1: TBA
Talk 2: TBA
Talk 1: Open Weight AI Models: What Works, What Breaks, and When to Bet on Them
Cloud APIs have dominated the AI conversation, and for good reason. They're easy to start with. But open weight models have quietly crossed a capability threshold that changes the calculus for businesses that care about cost, data sovereignty, or simply not being locked into someone else's roadmap.
This talk cuts through the hype with a practitioner's lens. We'll start with what actually works in production today: which model families deliver real results on real business tasks, what they handle well, and where they still fall short. Every claim is grounded in actual deployments, not benchmarks or blog posts.
Then we'll get honest about the gotchas. Quantization tradeoffs that silently degrade quality. The gap between "it works in the demo" and "it works at 2am on a Saturday." The operational overhead that nobody puts in the pitch deck. These are lessons learned the hard way, and you should hear them before you commit.
The centrepiece is a live model shootout: open weight models versus cloud APIs, head to head, on tasks that mirror what businesses actually need. Not synthetic benchmarks. Not cherry-picked examples. You'll see where open weight models match or beat the cloud, and where they genuinely don't.
We'll close with a decision framework built from production experience: when open weight is the right bet, when cloud APIs are the better call, and the hidden costs on both sides that most comparisons miss. Whether you're a founder evaluating your AI stack, a CTO weighing build-versus-buy, or an executive trying to separate signal from noise, you'll leave with a practical scorecard you can act on.
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Special Thanks:
- To SQ Collective for the venue
- This is the SQ Collective calendar that you can subscribe to: https://luma.com/Ai-labs
- This is the Technology calendar that you can subscribe to: https://luma.com/calendar/cal-ZrFfXqC7PgzbBaQ - It will include tech events from tech unicorn startups such as Amplitude, Databricks, Elastic, and more
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We will be giving wrist bands to attendees.
When coming, please make sure to have your Luma account or your Meetup account ready on your laptop web browser, or on the respective mobile app.
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Tags: Technology, AI Agents, Tool-Calling, Database