Since I'm doing my internship at Howest, I didn't have to travel far. I simply walked from De Vibe in the J building to the A building. On the way, I called my mother who was on vacation in India at the time.
I entered the main hall and was told the event would take place on the second floor. I had almost forgotten about this stairwell, but this Tech&Meet reminded me of it again. The AI students in Applied Computer Science had most of their classes here during the 4th and 5th semesters, on the fifth floor to be precise.
The first person who greeted me was Patrick van Renterghem, with whom I had sat together in De Vibe an hour earlier. My colleague, with whom I had already had many conversations in Dutch, asked me formally (and as an attempt at humor) if I spoke Dutch, so that the presenters would know whether they could use the Dutch presentation or if they should switch to English.
There were a few familiar faces—some people from the TI department, and some adults who had volunteered to attend a presentation about Generative AI at 7 PM.
I sat all the way in the back to be able to take better photos 😃
Sara Claessens, Senior HR Business Partner, started by giving some information about her company, "Planet Group," which specializes in flexible and temporary staffing. This part lasted literally 5 minutes. She mentioned that the Ghelamco Arena is now sponsored by Planet Group, joking that we could now call it the "Planet Group Arena."
Then it was Christiaan Gijsels' turn to present.
I don't think he took Mrs. Terryn's lessons, because there was way too much text on his slides 😂
He mentioned that Microsoft has invested in OpenAI and that Microsoft Copilot therefore uses GPT. I wasn't sure if that was correct, but he said they were going to release their own model called "Mia." After some impromptu research (learned at Howest, of course), it turns out that Microsoft does indeed have an LLM named Phi.
He stated that Elon Musk had founded OpenAI along with the other founders, which isn't accurate.
He asked if anyone used Deepseek and was surprised when 10 people raised their hands. Then, several European generative AI companies were mentioned, including Mistral. He mentioned using Codestral as his model of choice.
The next topic was GDPR and privacy measures to ensure that American LLMs don't violate our legislation.
He advised us not to use "top 100 prompts" on LinkedIn because they're not accurate. He shared that he teaches himself Spanish using ChatGPT's Speech function to learn word pronunciation.
He mentioned that in Europe, we don't have access to the most recent models (our knowledge cut-off date is 2023/2024, while in the US it's just a month ago). The functionalities are also different, with features becoming available in the US first.
He explained how to archive chats to save your old conversations (and then delete all the chats you no longer need, keeping your chat history clean). He also demonstrated how to set up a project with ChatGPT using custom prompts for all chats in that environment.
He showed us how to use the "canvas" feature. In his use case, he created a Business Model Canvas and could speak with it to make quick adjustments—a sort of face-to-face conversation with direct modifications.
Finally, he explained what GPTs are (custom GPTs) and how companies like Lucidchart create GPTs to sell their products.
Back home
When the event finally ended, 18 minutes late, I hurried out because I needed to catch my train after a quick visit to the restroom.
I had never seen the station of Bruges so empty before.
This route was tiring, but I was glad I had attended the event.
- Walk from Howest Campus A to Bruges station
- Take the train to Oostende
- Take the bus to the bus stop closest to my home
- Walk home
I found out that buses departing after 20.00 take a different route, which I had never noticed before. It goes to Marie-Joseplein and then towards the AZ Damiaan, instead of just going straight to AZ Damiaan.
I had to ask the bus driver what was going on, and his friend explained it to me. It was just us three on the bus, so it was a bit awkward.