​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.

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​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

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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