Rust LA at LA Tech Week: Exploring Rust's role in AI

October's Rust LA meetup was a little different, as we brought the community together for a special LA Tech Week edition!

We welcomed Greg Schoeninger from Oxen.ai back to Rust LA after he spoke at our very first meetup in January, alongside Antoine Gargot from Origin Lab, who joined us as a speaker for the first time.

Both shared how their companies are using Rust in AI, giving everyone a chance to learn more about the technology, ask questions and hear directly from the people working with it.

It was also great to welcome some new faces to Rust LA. With our first anniversary coming up, it's been exciting to see how much the community has grown, and we're looking forward to introducing everyone to even more companies and people using Rust across LA.

We caught up with Sean Urbain, Rust LA organiser and Divisional Manager at Lawrence Harvey, to hear his thoughts on the evening, what he learnt from the speakers and what he's most proud of as the community approaches its first year.

How would you sum up last night's Rust LA event?

The Rust LA Tech Week event was awesome! We got to learn about 2 unique ways companies are using Rust to power their LLMs and specifically around data collection and ingestion. My favorite part was getting to see Oxen.AI's image generation, where he created an Oxen and Rust LA video in real time to show us the power of their platform and how it collates both local and large language models together! 

What were your biggest takeaways from the talks by Oxen.ai and Origin Lab?

My biggest takeaway from these talks was around how much power and data is actually collected by these models, how much inferencing needs to be done, and the different ways the data can be used by companies for insights. There is a huge demand for scale, data collections tools and storage of this data for future use, and the amounts of data itself being used is just too much for humans to manage effectively, which is where the AI, it's safety and reliability, is most important.

Were there any audience questions or conversations that particularly stood out?

There was a question regarding compute power and how rust solves for a lot of memory safety and reliability concerns, catching bugs and debugging, that was very interesting! 

As Rust LA approaches it's first anniversary, what are you most proud of about how the community has grown?

Leading up to our 1 year anniversary, im especially proud of how we have been able to double the group size, and how many different companies we have been able to introduce to the scene. We are now getting out of our office and moving around LA, which has been so much fun as we get to physically see the things Rust touches for these different companies and how it is transforming businesses left and right! Cannot wait to see what new companies join us next year!