AI Research Night — Case Studies in Pretraining

with ElevenLabs, Geodesic Research & PostHog · at the Shoreditch Treehouse If you've pretrained a model before you know you need data worth learning from, compute, and a serious answer to "why not just call an API?" This is an evening with three teams who have answers — at different scales — followed by an open discussion and plenty of canapés to keep us going. Talks (15 min each + Q&A) Pretraining a GPT on a laptop — Angelos Perivolaropoulos, (Research Engineer at ElevenLabs) - What intuition from 10M parameters does (and doesn't) transfer upward. A from-scratch encoder for session replay data — Nico Waltz, (AI Research Engineer at PostHog) - A self-supervised encoder trained directly on DOM recordings, built to replace a video-rasterizer + VLM pipeline in production. Alignment pretraining — Cameron Tice (Co-Founder & Executive Director, Geodesic Research) - Lessons from training 6.9B-parameter LLMs on 500B tokens across four different data conditions to test how AI discourse in pretraining corpora affects alignment. Who this is for​Active PhD students and AI researchers with hands-on experience applying their work — people who have trained models. Registration is approved manually. Agenda 18:30 — Doors, drinks 19:00 — Talks 20:10 — Open discussion 20:40 — Dinner in the treehouse