I can make an LLM speak Portuguese? It's Pydata Copenhagen!

Have you ever wondered what goes into making an LLM? Wonder no more, as we will delve into the birds and the bees on how a baby LLM is born and grows into something that can eat the world!

Agenda:
17:00 Arrive, hang out, get some snacks, beer, soda,
17:30 Food!
18:15 Intro
18:30 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to European Portuguese LLMs
Duarte Carmo - Independent AI/ML research engineer and contractor

Large language models are eating the world. Frontier labs keep pushing the boundary, open-weights models are quickly closing the gap, Europe is — as always — stuck somewhere in the middle, and even Portugal has now released AMÁLIA, its own effort in the space.

But what does it actually take to build an LLM trained on a niche dataset? Why would you? And where do you start when there is so little data? In this talk, I’ll walk through my work on European Portuguese LLMs: from building benchmarks, to finding and filtering data, to training models, and everything in between. Even though this talk focuses on Portuguese, it should be easily applicable to any language/domain!

19:30 More socializing, discussions, hanging out
22:00 Doors close

Sponsors:
Thanks to NumFocus for running Pydata!

Special thanks to PROSA for hosting us!