The Science and Engineering of Large Language Models Workshop Slides

It has been a while since I last gave a talk. I guess that’s what happens when your research and interest becomes hot and and you stay. I was invited to give a talk at the The Science and Engineering of Large Language Models Workshop in South Africa AIMS.

The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) is a pan-African network of Centres of Excellence for post-graduate training in mathematical sciences, research and public engagement in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). AIMS is enabling Africa’s talented students to become innovators driving the continent’s scientific, educational and economic self-sufficiency.

I’m glad I’ve decided to join the workshop and travelled across the world to Cape Town. In between Gemini deadlines, I was able to distill years of learning and research curating a 2 hour class on compression and efficient fine-tuning topics. You don’t know how much you know until you start explaining things. It was a nice reminder that things that are trivial for you can be valuable learning for others.

So here are the slides I’ve compiled for the two lectures. Quite a few slides are taken-from (and attributed-to) the existing material online created by colleges, which enabled me to prepere for this talk between deadlines (thank you!).