The Rise of Open Source LLMs [Video]

Last year has been the year of Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLM). Companies such as OpenAI and Microsoft have been bringing the technology alive and rolling it out to millions of users.

However, in parallel, the Open-Source world has also been pushing the envelope very far with regards to these technologies, providing countless LLMs and other Generative AI technologies for the community to benefit from. We at https://sie.ag/2pocQZ team have been exploring the huge potential offered by Open Source AI technologies and their advantages compared to those provided by OpenAI and Microsoft.

In this presentation, we will take you through our journey in the exploration of self-hosted Open Source LLMs, how we bring it up to scale and empower it with Inner Source software context.

Fabio Huser is a Senior Key Expert at Siemens. He is a founding member of the team behind https://sie.ag/2pocQZ, a Siemens-wide social coding platform powered by GitLab. Together with this team, he provides a state-of-the-art developer experience to more than 50k users, while not only managing the infrastructure and operations, but also community building, coaching, support, upstream contributions and much more, all in the ethos “for developers, from developers”.

Besides this, he also co-founded a web and mobile framework, Siemens oldest inner-source project with the largest community and user-base behind it, where he still gets his hands dirty with the latest frontend technologies on a daily basis. With this project, he tries to spread the use and spirit of inner-source throughout the whole company and scales-up the new ways of working in software development.

Coming from an electronics engineering background, he quickly moved towards all sorts of web development activities, while also taking a foothold in backend programming. In his free time, he is always out on a hunt for new technologies and loves to struggle with them. He feels home in the OSS world and besides contributing, also maintains a few projects himself.

Dr. Ercan Uçan is also a Senior Key Expert at Siemens, working as a member of the team behind https://sie.ag/2pocQZ. Together with the team, he aims to provide a state-of-the-art developer experience to more than 70k users, again with the motto “for developers, from developers”.

Ercan has a background in Computer Science. He completed his PhD at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich in the area of distributed systems and computer networks. He also worked SCION, a research project on the next generation of Internet architecture. He has done his Master’s studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the area of peer-to-peer systems and gossip protocols. Besides spending time in the academia, he has also spent a significant amount of time working as a cloud developer at companies such as Swiftkey (Microsoft) and Siemens.

Outside of engineering and technology, Ercan spends the rest of his time with music, as the guitarist of the Zurich-based rock band The Birthday Girls.
Slides: https://sie.ag/4oA56K

The Open Source @ Siemens event is an annual series by Siemens for all topics around open source software, collaboration culture and technology. This year’s installment marks the 11th edition, with the series completely open to the public since 2021. The entire event was recorded live at Galvanik in Zug, Switzerland.

Learn more at https://sie.ag/2TGDPK