Oct Meetup - AI Open Models

Welcome back to our meetup in October. The date is right before the F1 weekend. (If this is your first time coming to the venue, please scroll down to the bottom to find the instructions for getting to the venue.) 06:00 PM Registration, networking 06:30 PM Talk starts If you want to have practical AI Models that are open-weight and free, this event is for you. --- Other community news: 1. We are also planning to hold a social Pickleball event in Oct/Nov sponsored and open to previous attendees of previous community events. A separate invite and event page will be sent out later. 2. We may also do something cool for F1 weekend in Oct for previous attendees of at least 3 previous community events. --- Open-Weight AI Models are AI models whose core weight files are publicly released so you can download them, run them on your own computers, and modify them for your needs. --- Talk 1: Open Weight AI Models: What Works, What Breaks, and When to Bet on Them Cloud APIs have dominated the AI conversation, and for good reason. They're easy to start with. But open weight models have quietly crossed a capability threshold that changes the calculus for businesses that care about cost, data sovereignty, or simply not being locked into someone else's roadmap. This talk cuts through the hype with a practitioner's lens. We'll start with what actually works in production today: which model families deliver real results on real business tasks, what they handle well, and where they still fall short. Every claim is grounded in actual deployments, not benchmarks or blog posts. Then we'll get honest about the gotchas. Quantization tradeoffs that silently degrade quality. The gap between "it works in the demo" and "it works at 2am on a Saturday." The operational overhead that nobody puts in the pitch deck. These are lessons learned the hard way, and you should hear them before you commit. The centrepiece is a live model shootout: open weight models versus cloud APIs, head to head, on tasks that mirror what businesses actually need. Not synthetic benchmarks. Not cherry-picked examples. You'll see where open weight models match or beat the cloud, and where they genuinely don't. We'll close with a decision framework built from production experience: when open weight is the right bet, when cloud APIs are the better call, and the hidden costs on both sides that most comparisons miss. Whether you're a founder evaluating your AI stack, a CTO weighing build-versus-buy, or an executive trying to separate signal from noise, you'll leave with a practical scorecard you can act on. Talk 2: Verified Timelocks for AI Cybersecurity The landscape of cybersecurity is changing like never before because of the cyber capabilities of AI models. The average breakout time of 29 minutes last year may go under 1 minute in the following years, giving attack an unprecedented advantage over defense. To protect critical IT systems, there is a need for a radically novel solution. OKcontract Labs has spent several years researching and developing new key blockchain technologies to manage workflows and policies entirely onchain, protected by formally verified timelocks. This unique property enables buying time, which is the only way left to protect complex organizations. It applies to standard components including AWS, IAM, Git access, and more. These developments have been recognized and cited by Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum as "A more specialized and more focused way to secure onchain interactions". OKcontract Pte. Ltd. is a Singapore-based company, co-founded by Henri Binsztok, PhD in Machine Learning from Paris Sorbonne, former Chief Innovation Officer at Wallix (Bloomberg: ALLIX.PA), and Ida Swarczewskaja, former Head of UX at French tech unicorn Mirakl. The company is funded by investors including Analog Ventures, Ethereum Ecosystem Fund, Protocol Labs, Longhash and others. --- Special Thanks: - To SQ Collective for the venue - This is the SQ Collective calendar that you can subscribe to: https://luma.com/Ai-labs - This is the Technology calendar that you can subscribe to: https://luma.com/calendar/cal-ZrFfXqC7PgzbBaQ - It will include tech events from tech unicorn startups such as Amplitude, Databricks, Elastic, and more --- We will be giving wrist bands to attendees. When coming, please make sure to have your Luma account or your Meetup account ready on your laptop web browser, or on the respective mobile app. --- Tags: Technology, AI Agents, Tool-Calling, Database