Open Source Summit Europe 2024

When you join an open source community, do you ever wonder how it got started? Was infrastructure like CI/CD, code checking tools, docs, etc. started from day 0 or built bit-by-bit from day 1 onwards? Do people assume particular roles or does everyone just jump in to get things rolling? Do you build up some capabilities first and then open it up, or just go gung-ho? In this talk, we tell the story of how an idea germinated from the IBM AI research team and investigated on a dev laptop led to IBM and Red Hat building out an entire project to successfully create the InstructLab open source community in just 9 weeks. We will treat you to a behind the scenes look at how a huge undertaking like this can be realized - warts and all. We invite you to join us for our story of how a dedicated team working together took complex AI concepts that seemed near-impossible to make open source and built a community that allows anyone to contribute improvements to LLMs. Attendees will leave with a thorough understanding of how to create the scaffolding for a successful project opening in a short time frame, with all requisite buzzwords like “GenAI” included, but not obnoxiously so.