Working in NLP in the Age of Large Language Models

Join Charlottesville Data Science for our September event!

Please join Charlottesville Data Science for the talk Working in NLP in the Age of Large Language Models from Zak Brown! We'll be gathering in-person at Vault Virginia on the Downtown Mall.

About the talk

Large language models have caused quite a splash in recent months, with headline-catching demonstrations of novel capabilities such as writing rap songs in the style of Shakespeare and even trying (unsuccessfully) to take over the world. But for many of the people currently working in or wanting to enter the space of Natural Language Processing, the advent and proliferation of these models has caused a paradigm shift in the way we think about approaching novel NLP tasks. In this talk, we’ll discuss the past decade of advances in NLP and how we’ve continually seen roles and business opportunities evolve at a rapid pace.

About the speaker

Zak Brown is currently the NLP Team Lead at Kensho Technologies, an innovation hub for S&P Global. His career has mainly focused on natural language processing, deep learning, and developing architectures for scaling compute-intensive workloads. Additionally, Zak is an organizer for both the local RVA Data Science Community Meetup group as well as the RVATech Data Summit. 

Outside of work, Zak enjoys spending time with his wife and kids. His hobbies include playing music, being a great armchair movie critic, traveling, and physical fitness.