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Meetup #0 Recap: Meetup #0 blew past all expectations. We planned for a dozen people to sit around and talk about maybe having an event someday -- 75 people registered and all 75 showed up to Native Sons Hall.
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*The room included a Meta AI contractor who built his own GPU cluster on Hornby Island, a Linux kernel developer working on drone systems, the mayor of Courtenay, an architect worried about his profession's future, and a cheese company that spontaneously became our first sponsor. This wasn't a "let's plan something" meeting, it became the thing itself.
Next one's May 7th, and we're already talking hackathon.*
Something's been brewing on North Island. Quana Parker, who runs the Hornby Spark makerspace, taught himself AI seven days after ChatGPT launched, wrote a book about it a month later, built a 7-node GPU cluster in his house using off-lease enterprise hardware from eBay, and parlayed all that into a prompt engineering gig at Meta.
He's been doing multimodal AI evaluation work for almost two years now. "Access to compute is really the trick," he said. "You could buy off-lease enterprise grade hardware off eBay for fractions of cents on the dollar."
Daniel Phillips dropped in because Google AI told him to. Turns out he's a Linux kernel developer responsible for some of the base work that made Linux able to "take over most of the world's computing power." He moved back to the valley from Silicon Valley and is now working on F-35 memory overflow problems and Canadian drone systems. "The F-35 program has a big problem -- the fighters actually run out of memory in the air and the screen goes blank. Is that bad? That's very bad."
Gray, running a tech startup incubator for 13 years, casually mentioned they have projects in genomics (dark genome), drone systems, and quantum computing. All from the Comox Valley.
Tom the architect opened with the fact that his profession was listed first in "jobs AI will eliminate." He's seen the BC government release an app where you design apartment buildings with no architect. But here's the interesting part, he's not sure it matters. "How many people here live in a space designed by an architect?"
Most hands went up. "I was gonna say, I'm not too worried because nobody really likes architecture anyways."
The real insight came from Lisa at Natural Pastures cheese company. She used ChatGPT to design a vision for a community laneway project that no one could afford an architect for -- and it got more people to the table. Then she designed their new cheese gift box packaging using AI.
"It was gonna cost $3,000 to hire our normal designers. This took a little bit of time off the side of my desk over two years." She showed up with actual cheese and became our first sponsor on the spot.
Leah Tran drove down from Campbell River. She's president of the Creative Industries Council up there. "Spotify gave me my year-end wrapped and ChatGPT gave me mine too -- top 1% of users." She's watching AI take "swaths" of her media company's business, so she got deeply into building with it instead.