The Oxford Artificial Intelligence Summit: Towards AGI

Overview

Over the last few years, the pandemic has vividly demonstrated the importance of face-to-face meetings - and there is always something magical about meeting at the University of Oxford. 

Designed primarily for our past Artificial Intelligence course participants, but open to all, we are pleased to present the Artificial Intelligence Summit: Towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) on Friday 24 - Saturday 25 May 2024 at the University of Oxford. 

Despite the challenges of the last few years, the rise of GPT and ChatGPT have democratised AI and placed humanity firmly on the road to AGI. However, these rapid tectonic shifts have created technological, economic, and societal challenges - the foremost among them being the need for rapid upskilling in the age of generative AI.

The AI Summit takes a skills based approach helping you to transition your career towards AI.  This event will provide you with a unique and exceptional opportunity to meet and network with your professional peers from the world of AI whilst also providing an educational element to enhance your skillset.

Adopting a hackathon format, the summit takes a hands-on approach.  You will participate in a hackathon working on problems that are designed to architect and implement Generative AI solutions.

If the above themes resonate with you, we would be happy to see you at the AI Summit.

Uniquely, because of the use of generative AI as an assistant, no prior coding experience is needed to participate in this summit including the hackathon. However, a broad understanding of IT is needed for this summit.

Programme details

There is a skills shortage in AI use, and to meet demand and ensure continued growth, there’s a need for technology and industry professionals to upskill within the area of generative AI.

Adopting generative AI means not only using the tools powered by it, but also to do so efficiently by learning "prompt engineering" and applying a methodology - a structured approach. This also includes a product management methodology for generative AI. This approach can then be applied by developers using GitHub Copilot, Open AI code interpreter, LlamaIndex or even plain ChatGPT itself.

Generative AI, via LLMs (Large Language Models), have presented a seismic shift in how fast we can get work done while lowering the technical barriers for application and system creation.

The hackathon will be based on a variety of LLM use cases with an emphasis on generative AI for code. The solution will also include a product management function, making it possible for non-developers to also be part of the solution. To innovate on top of LLMs and applications, such as task-focused agents or other AI-powered software, it's important to leverage efficient tool "workbenches" that tie everything together. These tools include LangChain, Pinecone, Polyglot Notebooks, Semantic Kernel and others.

The Generative AI hackathon

This summit is primarily concerned with building services for the new world of AGI and reskilling yourselves for a world dominated by AGI. 

In practice today, that means understanding the role of Large Language Models (LLMs) as an end-to-end application development platform.

The summit / hackathon will focus on the following set of skills:

1) Copilot - developing with AI as an assistant

2) Autonomous AI Agents

3) End to end development using Gen AI (combining product discovery, Gen AI and Test driven development)

4) Image and creative (multimodal workflows) - using AI with creative industries

5) Open AI and LlamaIndex stacks

6) Generative AI and knowledge graphs

7) Designing conversation agents

8) Designing Enterprise Generative AI systems

9) Prompt engineering

Logistics and notes for the hackathon

  • To make the summit inclusive, in general, we will be adopting prompt engineering as a framework. However, the summit involves creation of code using prompt engineering. 
  • The summit spans two days. Overall, the first day is designed to learn the technologies. The second day is designed to brainstorm individual solutions and problems.
  • We will suggest problem statements.
  • You will work in groups.
  • Working online, you will have one week to complete your solutions. It is expected that you would spend about 8 hours over the week, working in a group. Each group would manage their own online working schedule. 
  • We expect that most of the speakers would be personally present but some will be online (see Tutors section for details).
  • You will work with one main project but you could be part of up to three projects.

Note: Due to the fast-changing nature of AI, it is possible some updates will be made to the content and format of this event.

Attending this event 

Further details will be emailed to you two weeks ahead of the summit and will include registration information and an overview of the timetable.

Please get in touch if you have not received this information within five working days of the start date. 

In the meantime, you may wish to plan your travel: Travel information

Digital Certification

To complete the course, you will be required to attend and participate in all of the sessions on the course in order to be considered for a certificate. Participants who complete the course will receive a link to download a University of Oxford digital certificate. Information on how to access this digital certificate will be emailed to you after the end of the course.

The certificate will show your name, the course title and the dates of the course you attended. You will also be able to download your certificate or share it on social media if you choose to do so.

Fees

Description Costs
1) Standard fee £595.00

Payment

Fees include course materials, tuition, refreshments and lunches. The price does not include accommodation.

All courses are VAT exempt.

Register immediately online 

Click the “book now” button on this webpage. Payment by credit or debit card is required.

Request an invoice

If you require an invoice for your company or personal records, please contact the course administration team. 
Payment is accepted online, by credit/debit card, or by bank transfer. Please do not send card or bank details via email.

Tutors

The below list of tutors is subject to change.

David Knott

Keynote Speaker

CTO, Cabinet Office, UK Gov

Ajit Jaokar

Conference Director and Speaker

Visiting Fellow, Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford

Mr John Alexander

Speaker

LLM Strategy Consultant and AI Developer

NB: this speaker will be joining the summit remotely

Dr Diego Colombo

Speaker

Principal Software Engineer heading the .NET Interactive and Polyglot Notebook team.

James Elles

Speaker

Former Member of the European Parliament
Co-Founder of the European Internet Foundation (EIF)

Marina Fernandez

Speaker

Digital Hive and Innovation consultant, Anglo American Plc

Anjali Jain

Speaker

Digital Solutions Architect, Metrobank

Liu Jerry

Speaker

Co-founder/CEO of LlamaIndex

NB: this speaker will be joining the summit remotely

Norah Klintberg Sakal

Speaker

AI enthusiast and entrepreneur

NB: this speaker will be joining the summit remotely

Ayşe Mutlu

Speaker

Data Scientist

Chris Noring

Speaker

Senior Cloud Advocate, Microsoft

Mr Jesus Serrano Castro

Speaker

Microsoft

Matthias Funke

Speaker

MOSTLY AI

David Stevens

Speaker

Regional Director for Customer Success, Neo4j 

Level and demands

While this summit has been primarily designed for those who have previously taken one of our past Artificial Intelligence courses, it is open to all. 

Accommodation

Although not included in the course fee, accommodation may be available at our on-site Rewley House Residential Centre. All bedrooms are en suite and decorated to a high standard, and come with tea- and coffee-making facilities, free Wi-Fi access and Freeview TV. Guests can take advantage of the excellent dining facilities and common room bar, where they may relax and network with others on the programme.

To check prices, availability and to book rooms please visit the Rewley House Residential Centre website.