Check‑in was quick, the taproom buzzing by 6 p.m. Digital‑health founders clinked glasses with IoT hobbyists, and a surprising number of philosophy grads compared notes with game‑dev veterans. Wild AI’s “no slides, no gatekeeping” rule flattened every hierarchy: just five‑minute fire‑talks, name tags, and unstructured networking.
Why it matters: The group isn’t trying to be another conference. It’s a sandbox where API tinkerers, educators, and sales‑ops strategists collide—and leave with phone numbers, not business cards.
Semantic search done right. Our kickoff discussion explored how Microsoft’s Semantic Kernel is fast becoming a universal adapter for LLMs—now with Java SDK support and a healthy stable of open‑source “skills.” The crowd zeroed in on vector databases as the secret sauce behind lightning‑fast retrieval of resumes, conference transcripts, and other semi‑structured text.
From Next.js to full desktop automation. Front‑end devs shared tales of wrestling (and eventually making peace) with Next.js, while a live demo showed an LLM orchestrating mouse clicks and keystrokes on a Windows machine—powered by YOLO‑based object detection over the screen buffer. The big takeaway: abstract the low‑level API calls so your prompt can read like a checklist, not a stack trace.
IoT, meet AI. A show‑and‑tell of personal projects ranged from a Raspberry Pi–driven geothermal controller (yes, using the old thermistor lines) to ESP32 wireless relays. The conversation inevitably landed on when to embed tiny AI accelerators on‑board versus streaming sensor data to the cloud for heavier inference.
Bottom line: Sales Ops is finally getting the same ML love that marketing enjoyed five years ago.
Most ML tutorials glorify “easy data”: perfectly labeled, open‑sourced, and irrelevant to clinics. Real healthcare projects, he reminded us, live in “hard data” messy EHR exports, half‑filled Access tables, and sensors that drift. His playbook:
A Socratic Tutor GPT prompts students with “Why?” until they articulate reasoning. In VR, avatars of Confucius and Karl Marx spar over economic theory while spectators earn points for spotting logical fallacies. Next up: a fully explorable metaverse “library of ideas.” Unity/C# contributors welcome.
TL;DR: Wild AI is equal parts tech dojo and coffeehouse debate. Show up, ship a 300‑second demo, and find your next collaborator over a pint. See you on the third Thursday!