Day 1 of PyCon 2023

Attending today the first day of PyCon 2023 in Salt Lake City at the Salt Palace Convention Center - the 20th anniversary of PyCon. It was all pretty cool. After flying in early in the morning, I quickly checked into my hotel, grabbed some roasted vegetable stir fry for lunch, and headed straight to the afternoon talks.

There were lots of choices of sessions to attend, but the first talk of the day I chose was about the advancements in high-performance AI/ML through PyTorch's Python compiler. The speaker talked about that as GPUs continue to become faster, PyTorch, one of the most widely used frameworks in AI/ML, has faced challenges keeping up with performance demands. The PyTorch development team recognized the need to address these challenges while maintaining PyTorch's Python roots, and set ambitious goals to improve performance, decrease memory usage, enable state-of-the-art distributed capabilities, and ensure more PyTorch code is written in Python. To achieve these goals, they developed a Python compiler, resulting in a 43% speedup in performance.

I would've like to have heard more specifically about PyTorch's plans but it was interesting nonetheless.

With LLMs and ChatGPTs being such a hot topic, I was anxious for the next two talks I had lined up. Since these talks were approved back in November, I'm sure many of the speakers had to rewrite and add to their talks with everything that has happened in AI and with LLMs specifically.

The second talk was about building LLM-based agents sponsored by Haystack, which was particularly interesting to me considering all of the excitement around autonomous agents and that Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have taken the Internet by storm.

Using LLMs as so-called "Agents" allows you to use them as a decision maker in your application that reacts to all sorts of user requests. In this talk, we learned how to build an agent-driven application with Haystack, which was accompanied by code examples. By the end of the talk, we were able to see these concepts applied in practice, and we were better equipped to build an agent-driven application for our own use case.

The third talk I saw was particularly interesting and relevant for me was from a company called Cape Privacy about the "ChatGPT Privacy Tango" as they titled it. The talk delved into a system designed to help users navigate the privacy and PII data, striking a balance between preserving privacy and maximizing utility with ChatGPT and LLMs.

During the talk, we learned about the significance of protecting personally identifiable information (PII) and maintaining data security while still enjoying the advantages of AI-powered language models.

However, I did notice that the sponsor of the talk was pushing their solution and not mentioning the differences in OpenAI's policy of opt-in for their API and for using Co-Pilot compared to the opt-out that a person needs to do for the ChatGPT UI. This led to the sponsor appearing to inflate some of the risks. Nonetheless, the talk shed light on the path towards more privacy-aware applications with Large Language Models.

Overall, the first day of PyCon 2023 was pretty good, and I am looking forward to the next three days.