Come join us after NeurIPS for the 8th Scaling Workshop series that started in Oct 2021!
We provide a forum for discussing the challenges and advances in scaling foundation models. This workshop, co-organized by Cerebras Systems, MBZUAI and the CERC in Autonomous AI Lab led by Irina Rish at the Universite de Montreal and Mila – Quebec AI Institute will focus on both development and deployment aspects of large-scale models.
What to Expect
-> Frontier-scale training insights from leaders pushing the boundaries of pretraining, MoE architectures, and open foundation models.
-> Systems-level breakthroughs in distributed training and real-time inference from institutions like OpenAI, Snowflake, Vector Institute, and more.
-> Deep dives into model optimization — compression, ternary LLMs, hardware-aware design, and next-gen inference strategies.
-> Two high-profile panels featuring top thinkers shaping the geopolitics and economics of AI.
-> Evening receptions & networking with researchers, industry experts, and founders.
Program Highlights
Friday, December 5 from 5pm – Scaling Training & Distributed Systems
Vol Kyrylov (OpenAI) — GPT-OSS: 128 experts on a single GPU
Hector Liu (MBZUAI) — Pushing open foundation models to the limit
Marco Ciccone (Vector Institute) — Training LLMs across public supercomputers
Aurick Qiao (Snowflake) — Breaking the speed-cost tradeoff in LLM serving
Panel (7pm): “Sovereign AI: The Case for Building Your Own” featuring: Natalia Vassilieva, Sara Hooker, Keunwoo Choi, Rio Yokota, Hrant Khachatrian, Preslav Nakov
Saturday, December 6 from 5pm – Efficient Inference & Model Optimization
Daria Soboleva (Cerebras) — MoE 101: Efficient training & serving
Junyang Lin (Qwen/Alibaba) — Deep dive into Qwen3
Eric Sather (Cerebras) — ML for high-performance inference
Irina Rish (UdeM/Mila/42.com) — Research perspectives on inference efficiency
Ayush Kaushal (Nolano AI/Mila) — Scaling laws & ternary LLM inference
Panel (7pm): “AI: Show Me the Money” Featuring: swyx, Dylan Patel, Irina Rish, Tri Dao, Hung Bui, Rahul Sengottuvelu
Saturday, December 6 at 8pm – Closing Reception 🍾🥳
Celebrate with speakers and participants!
Workshop website: https://sites.google.com/mila.quebec/8th-scaling-workshop/
Full Schedule: https://sites.google.com/mila.quebec/8th-scaling-workshop/schedule
Organizers: Natalia Vassilieva, Daria Soboleva, Karina Anichkina-Wolf, Alexis Roger, Irina Rish
Moderators (sessions and panel): Daria Soboleva
