An Urban Walk to Silicon Chalet 38 - IA at Infomaniak

Yesterday I went to Geneva early. In the process I dropped into the GoSocial Co-working event at Ruby Hotel, before then walking towards the Orthodox church in Geneva. The doors were open so I visited the building. It smelled of incense and someone was cleaning.

Co-working

There is a GoSocial group on Whatsapp that often meets once to twice per week to do some co-working with other people, rather than in solitude. A few weeks ago I drove to Geneva to meet the group but my introversion got the better of me so I got equipment for hiking instead.

This time, as I had an hour or two to spare, I went up to meet two or three of these people so that, in future, meeting up with them will be more comfortable. It would be nice to have a group to meet more regularly.

Urban Walking

They ask that people do not take photos so I respected that request. I was struck by the painting of the walks, the icons, and at one point the smell of candle wax. The shape is also different than I am used to, being square.

Silicon Chalet and AI Discussions

I then walked in Geneva for about four kilometres before reaching Infomaniak. You wouldn’t know that it’s in the building unless you know the address, and check the names of businesses in that building, on a plaque.

The event that I attended didn’t take place in the main offices, but rather in the break room in another part of the building.

Two talks were given, One was about cost avoidance and finops and how it can have an effect within six months. The second was about creating a RAG system with the Infomaniak AI APIs.

FinOps

In brief, for me, the highlights of the first speech was that as you adopt cloud computing cloud costs increase, but that once things are running it is important to go back and observe whether resources are being used fully, or whether they’re dormant. it’s also important to reduce costs where possible. If a resource is over-provisioned then it makes sense to half it, but not minimise resources. The point is to avoid costs, and keep what is required.

Retrieval Augmented Generation from Scratch

The second talk was about training a personal LLM on a few documents, rather than a larger dataset to help parse information from those documents. The idea was to quickly demonstrate how Infomaniak tools could be used together related to the AI API.

Without paraphrasing the topic of using LLMs when they’re needed, and using other tools when appropriate was mentioned. There are occasions where a smaller model, or more specialised tool would be more cost effective.

And Finally

By going to Geneva early I had the opportunity to meet a person or three from the GoSocial co-working group, before going into the Orthodox church, out of curiousity for the first time. I then got to get a glimpse of Infomaniak in person before going to a meetup event about AI.

When I lived in London I loved going to such events, but the habit was lost due to that culture not being in Geneva yet. Now that it is here, I can take advantage and attend more events, network and find opportunities. Tonight I will go to an event in Nyon, and tomorrow it will be another event in Geneva. Saturday I will probably ride, and Sunday I will probably hike.