From GPUs to Mentorship: Insights and Connections at a Tech Meetup

Shout out to Dennis Kennetz for giving a crash course in large language models and the architecture of GPUs/CPUs. My biggest takeaways were:

💡 Differences in Instruction, Training, and Closed/Open-Source Models

💡 How large language models process your input by converting it into tokens and generate a response based on the most probable solutions?

💡There are several reasons why companies are pursuing data and the significance of cleansing that data for future use.

💡The trade-offs between latency and throughput in relation to GPUs and CPUs.

💡What's going on, behind the scenes, on my laptop CPU?

The best part of a tech meetup is before and after the main presentation. After Dennis' talk, I had the following conversations:

🎨 A visual demonstration of utilizing Figma to create UI components. Yes, we broke out the laptops.

💻 Overview of Client Engagement in Freelance Development Work

🎓 It was inspiring to hear young professionals share their career journeys from earning a computer science degree to entering the tech industry.

😍 A story of resilience overcoming layoffs, a breathtaking long job search, and now working at a major tech company in Memphis.

What truly moved me was witnessing a young professional—a recent Uni. of Memphis graduate thriving in a fantastic tech job— introducing a college student to each person at the event. I absolutely loved the imagery of that mentorship and the genuine effort to help someone else forge connections within the local industry. Instead of sitting passively, they actively engaged in the main presentation by asking insightful questions.