My AI Journey: From College to LLM Community

Embark on the journey of AI with curiosity as your compass and innovation as your destination. From humble beginnings to thriving communities, let’s explore the boundless possibilities together.

AI has been a part of my life for a while now. It’s been a wild ride, from college projects to working with the LLM community. Here’s a quick look at my journey with AI.

Getting Started

Back in college, when I was in my final year, I got into AI stuff with courses on AI and machine learning. My big project was all about using AI to make finger vein authentication better.

GitHub Copilot Appears

After college, I landed a gig at a startup as a Data Engineer. My job was about building the backend and pipelines for our data. Then, boom! GitHub Copilot dropped into open beta. It blew my mind. It felt like AI was saying, “Hey, I got your back. Let’s do this!” Productivity soared, Stack Overflow searches dropped, and I was in the zone.

Meeting ChatGPT

Up until then, AI was just a buddy for coding. But then ChatGPT showed up, and everything changed again. Suddenly, everyone at work, from the Business Analyst to the CEO, was talking about using ChatGPT. And around the same time, cool LLM frameworks like LangChain and llama index hit the scene.

ChatGPT is awesome, but it’s still a big tech thing - New features trickle out slowly. So, as devs, we couldn’t wait. We wanted our own chat AI. And that’s how our LLM journey began. Terms like LoRa and RAG became part of our daily vocab.

Joining the LLaMA Crew

I’ve always been into open source and community stuff. LLM was all about Big Tech until Meta dropped LLaMA. Suddenly, the power was back with the community. Tools like llama.cpp and ollama made diving into LLM way easier. Plus, thanks to ROCm, my AMD GPU could handle LLM models like a champ.

Today

Elon Musk went ahead and open-sourced Grok in March, and Cohere dropped Command R+ in April. The community’s tweaking and fine-tuning models to fit all sorts of needs. The LLM gang’s growing, and the future looks bright. Can’t wait to see what’s next for me and AI!