With active audience participation from several institutions and organizations for the entirety of the event, a single blog post may not do justice in summarizing our recent AWS Town Hall. However, I think we can list important key takeaways for you and your team to keep in mind. So, what exactly attracted so many people to attend a Zoom meeting? Two words: GenAI. Actually, that may be three words.
To break it down, there were two main topics of discussion:
- Brief Internet2 NET+ program updates
- Presentation by Vanderbilt’s Dr. Jules White and his team
General NET+ updates
- Refresher on the NET+ AWS Program.
- Sneak peak of an upcoming Internet2 program: Cloud Infrastructure Community Program (CICP).
- CICP gives access to best practices, strategic, technical, and informational gatherings on AWS and Google Cloud topics.
NET+ GenAI Updates
- Tiffany Frank introduces herself as the new technical program manager for AI programs at Internet2.
- Collaborative opportunities within AI: GenAI working group, upcoming AI service brokerage opportunities via NET+, and training on building with LLMs via CLASS.
- Update on the LLM Gateway Service Evaluation.
Dr. Jules White from Vanderbilt University Presents: "Vanderbilt’s Future of Learning and the Open Source Amplify GenAI Enterprise Platform"
- Dr. White and his team built a web app that allows students and faculty to interact with different LLM models to perform various tasks.
- These tasks range from getting help from the LLM to build quizzes for a certain topic, to analyzing expense policies, to creating PowerPoints.
- A cool note to add is that their platform allows end users to build their own agents and/or prompt templates for certain repetitive tasks.
- Key takeaway: LLMs are changing the way we solve problems and we should use it to our advantage given the available resources within the research and education community.
There were many questions from the audience. Below are some questions and answers I thought were relevant to point out here:
- How big is your team?
- A team of three full-time employees plus Dr. White, who is juggling his responsibilities as a professor.
- Is the Amplify AI app open-sourced? If so, can the research and education community contribute to it?
- Yes and yes. Here is the GitHub repository: https://github.com/gaiin-platform.
- Are you fine-tuning your LLMs?
- No, but we use RAG. We plan on launching adaptive RAG soon.
- Are there limits on the app?
- No limits. The average user is not costly for us. The average user will get the value they need very quickly. The cost comes from long conversations.
- How do you recommend other institutions build/introduce a similar tool to their institution?
- Start with an interdisciplinary group who are doing cool things with GenAI and introduce them to your tool. These people are your champions. Continue to bring on board more users, which then creates a ripple effect.
In short, what started as a presentation turned into a collaborative session among individuals from various institutions, discussing their ideas for their own GenAI projects with the presenters and other participants.
If you could not make it, we hope this summary is informative. We have made the slides and recording of the meeting accessible to the community. We hope to see you at our next AWS Town Hall meeting and at the next AWS Tech Share on 7/24.
Feel free to give feedback on this post below or send me an email at tmanik@internet2.edu. Let me know what you’d like to be included in future blog posts or if you have any follow-up questions. I’m still experimenting with the length and format of the blog post, so your feedback on this aspect is greatly appreciated. Till next time.