Month 2 at the AI Lab: Neural Nets and New Friends
Month 2 - Kurt Schwind broke down neural networks from scratch, and Josh & Alex brought the STL Gen AI crew back for a packed house of AI coders.
Neural Nets 101 with Kurt Schwind
On February 5th, Kurt Schwind walked us through what's actually happening inside a neural network. Sigmoid functions on the big screen, weights and biases on the whiteboard, and plenty of good questions from the group. Kurt has a knack for making the math approachable, and by the end of the evening even the folks who came in skeptical were drawing activation functions on napkins. Seeing how things like backpropogation work really helped folks what's happening behind all this AI. Full presentation in Kurt's github repo.
Beyond Vibes: AI Coding Meetup
The St. Louis Generative AI Lab Meetup returned on February 24th and this time the lab was packed wall-to-wall. Josh Frank led a peer-to-peer tips and tricks workshop where attendees shared their AI coding workflows - what tools they're using, what's actually working, and where the rough edges still are. Laptops were open, screens were shared, and the energy in the room was electric. It's becoming a real community of builders here in St. Louis, and seeing the AI Lab full of people making things is exactly what this space was built for!