So we finally admit it… scaling alone isn't saving anyone 💸

My keynote at #AIDevSummit dives into Less Compute, More Impact ⚡
Will also participate in a panel on what actually scales in Agentic AI 🤖

Also… free passes (yes, actually free) 🎟️ 👉 bit.ly/4cwaYro

I'll be presenting at @devoxxgreece.bsky.social 🎉

Session 1: The Sound of Your Secrets - will discuss acoustic side-channel attacks/defenses.

Session 2: How Model Quantization Fuels the Next Wave of Agentic AI - will discuss efficient AI systems and models

Info: bit.ly/4c9EjZG

As AI moves from demos to production, teams are prioritizing efficiency, smaller models, and agentic systems. Learn what’s driving the shift and how to build smarter AI workflows. #DataScience #AI #ArtificialIntelligence opendatascience.com/the-shift-to...

AI is forced to be derivative, so can it really capture the creativity of humans? John Romero says his development team created Doom because of who they were as people, and AI could not re-create it.

See more from John Romero at www.wearedevelopers.com/en/magazine/...

3 weeks until @odsc.bsky.social East! Will present 2 sessions...

Session 1: Less Compute, More Impact: How Model Quant Fuels the Next Wave of Agentic AI

Session 2: Train Your Own Sm. Lang Model: A Hands-On Workshop in Design, Distillation, and Deployment

👉 bit.ly/4tzWn54

2 weeks away from @devoxx.fr ! Will discuss "The Sound of Your Secrets: Teaching Your Model to Spy So You Can Learn to Defend" and how keystroke sounds can reveal what you type, and how to fight back.

📅 Wed, Apr 22 @ 14:35
📍 Room: TBA
📖 Info: bit.ly/4lzLJbC

📢 Speaker Announcement! Welcome David vonThenen, Senior AI/ML Engineer at NetApp, to #devbcn26! 🚀 Get ready for an eye-opening session on AI security: "The Sound of Your Secrets: Teaching Your Model to Spy, So You Can Learn to Defend". Grab Regular Tickets! 🎟️ buff.ly/AFSjWmY

Three weeks until @devoxxgreece.bsky.social, I'll be presenting...

⚙️ Less Compute, More Impact: How Model Quantization Fuels The Next Wave Of Agentic AI - making agentic AI faster and cheaper with quantization.

📅 Friday, April 24 @ 17:15
📍 Room: MC 2
📖 Info: bit.ly/4sSLYC8

Three weeks until @devoxxgreece.bsky.social, I'll be speaking on...

🛡️ The Sound of Your Secrets: Teaching A Model To Spy, So You Can Learn to Defend - How AI can infer what you type from keyboard sounds.

📅 Saturday, April 25 @ 11:25
📍Room: Skalkotas
info: bit.ly/49riFPi

Bigger ≠ better in production. The new @odsc.bsky.social blog breaks down why efficient, smaller models are winning 🚀⚡ + covers quantization, RAG pitfalls & real-world tradeoffs.

Grab 20% off ODSC East 🎉

Read more 👉 bit.ly/4bKQdHR

Excited to share that my session was accepted for @DevNetwork_ AI DevSummit 2026!

I'll be presenting "Less Compute, More Impact: How Model Quantization Fuels the Next Wave of Agentic AI."

📅 Conf Date: May 27 - 28
📍 Loc: San Fran
🔗 Info: aidevsummit.co

Who doesn't love a good Chuck Norris joke?

Absolute legend!

Big models aren’t always the answer 😅 Smaller, focused SLMs can win on cost, latency, and control 🚀

Join me this Tues, Mar 24 at 10am PT to break down fine-tuning, quantization, and real-world deployment strategies.

Details: bit.ly/4bwlPRC

Excited to share that I'll be speaking at @wearedevelopers.bsky.social World Congress Europe!

My session: "The Sound of Your Secrets: Teaching Your Model to Spy, So You Can Learn to Defend"

📅 Dates: July 8-10
📍 Berlin, Germany
🔗 Register: bit.ly/4bRiLzR

When token costs get expensive.... you gotta do, what you gotta do 🤣

LLMs don't run out of compute first… they run out of memory. 🤯🧠
KV cache, memory tiering, and shared storage are reshaping the economics of AI inference. I break down what's happening inside systems like vLLM + LMCache.

Read more: bit.ly/4bl87kn

#AIInference

Less Compute, More Impact: How Model Quantization Fuels the Next Wave of Agentic AI Editor’s note: David vonThenen is speaking at ODSC AI East this April 28th-30th. Check out his talk, “Less Compute, More Impact: How Model Quantization Fuels the Next Wave of Agentic AI,&#...

Model Quantization is reshaping AI economics by compressing large language models into smaller, faster, and more efficient systems. #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #DataScience opendatascience.com/less-compute...

People love AI demos… until production hits. 😅

On the Automate or Die Trying podcast, we break down the real challenges of enterprise AI: RAG accuracy, agent security, governance, and why "similarity" ≠ correctness in production.

Watch the episode: bit.ly/3PxRryI

Spent years chasing bigger models… turns out smarter engineering wins. 🚀
I joined the @odsc.bsky.social AI X Podcast to talk about real-world production AI: RAG failures, quantization, SLMs, and building efficient systems that actually ship. 🎧

Listen here: bit.ly/4ssrdMm

#AI

. @socallinuxexpo.bsky.social starts tomorrow!
I'll be presenting:
• A Practical Guide to Training a Small Language Model: bit.ly/3LkKjo0
• The Sound of Your Secrets: Teaching Your Model to Spy, So You Can Learn to Defend: bit.ly/4rlTiEP

Sneak peek below 👇

Bigger models used to win headlines. Now they win power bills ⚡

On the @odsc.bsky.social blog, I break down how quantization and specialized SLMs are reshaping agentic AI around efficiency, not ego. It's about value per watt, not parameter count 🚀

Read here: bit.ly/4s6iKye

Excited to join @WDI_conference 2026 🎉 My VoD session, “Rethinking RAG: How MCP and Agent2Agent Will Transform the Future of Intelligent Search”, dives into governance, grounding & multi-agent design 🚀

Register: bit.ly/474WJrs
Code: WID26SP20 🎟️

#GenAI

1 week until @socallinuxexpo.bsky.social

Session: The Sound of Your Secrets: Teaching Your Model to Spy, So You Can Learn to Defend
bit.ly/4rlTiEP

Session: A Practical Guide to Training a Small Language Model: Tokenizers, Training, and Real-World Pitfalls
bit.ly/3LkKjo0

Excited to share that my talk was accepted for @devoxx.fr. I'll be presenting "The Sound of Your Secrets: Teaching Your Model to Spy So You Can Learn to Defend," all about acoustic side-channel attacks and defenses.

More details: www.devoxx.fr/

Chorouk Malmoum, thank you for sharing this! It's deeply validating to see this coming out of NVIDIA's own research. I've been saying this for almost a year now. The first time I put it on record… | David vonThenen Chorouk Malmoum, thank you for sharing this! It's deeply validating to see this coming out of NVIDIA's own research. I've been saying this for almost a year now. The first time I put it on record was at Devoxx UK 2025. At the time, it was based on hands-on experience building and validating multi-agent systems. But in this field, experience alone doesn't move the needle. You need data. You need papers. You need proof. And now we have it. The idea that Small Language Models are better suited for agentic workflows makes sense from a software engineering perspective. Separation of concerns. Encapsulation. Instead of one giant "do everything" model, you create focused SLMs that act as subject matter experts. Each one handles a narrow domain. There's another benefit people don't talk about enough: control. A tightly scoped SLM is far more likely to say "I don't know" when it's outside its boundary. This is a good thing. A massive general model? It tends to guess. And it guesses confidently. In production systems, that's not intelligence. That's liability. The second paper, introducing NVIDIA's Orchestrator-8B, is the piece I've been waiting for. A router that decides when to escalate a problem/question versus when to call a cheap tool or a smaller model. I'm very interested in experimenting with Orchestrator-8B. If the benchmarks hold up, this could materially change how we design cost-efficient agent systems at scale. This news also just so happens to coincide with a workshop/tutorial I will be giving at Open Data Science Conference (ODSC) East (end of April) titled: 𝐋𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐮𝐭𝐞, 𝐌𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐈𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐜𝐭: 𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥 𝐐𝐮𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐳𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐅𝐮𝐞𝐥𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐍𝐞𝐱𝐭 𝐖𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐀𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐀𝐈 . I will do my best to include the findings/learnings from Orchestrator-8B in that session. (Tentative) Session Date: Tuesday, April 28 Session Info: https://bit.ly/4rxXeTg Read Chorouk's full breakdown below for more information and links to the research. .

NVIDIA's research backs it: Small Language Models > giant LLMs for agentic workflows 🔥 Focused SLMs = better control, lower cost, fewer "confident guesses."

Orchestrator-8B as a smart router? Game changer. I'll cover this at @odsc.bsky.social East! 🚀

More info: bit.ly/4aCsYPG

Really looking forward to SCaLE this year. Going to be a lot of fun (with learning some cool stuff)!

Automate or Die Trying | David vonThenen Recorded a great conversation last week with Wil Ramos (https://lnkd.in/gV9jQBUV) on the 𝐀𝐮𝐭𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐨𝐫 𝐃𝐢𝐞 𝐓𝐫𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠 podcast. Wil, thanks for having me on. I appreciate the space to go deep on topics that don't always fit into a conference talk. The episode should be out in a week or two. I'll share the link here once it's live. Here's some of what we covered: 👉 How to harden RAG and agent workflows so they act only on verifiable evidence - Grounded data - Clear audit trails - Preventing agents from drifting into hallucinated "actions" or "decisions" 👉 What it takes to make agentic automation safe enough to run unattended - Guardrails - Checkpoints - Human-in-the-loop 👉 And the broader state of AI right now. Where it's moving. Where it's messy. And where we need to be more disciplined. I've been listening to several episodes of 𝐀𝐮𝐭𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐨𝐫 𝐃𝐢𝐞 𝐓𝐫𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠 , and they're worth your time. What I like most is the range of perspectives. Different guests, different takes, real-world lessons. It's people building and securing real systems. If you're into automation, security, or AI systems, subscribe to the podcast here: YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gRKCEAJw Spotify: https://lnkd.in/ggDUeAyR More soon, once the episode drops.

Recorded an episode of "Automate or Die Trying" Podcast with Wil Ramos! 🚀 We went deep on hardening RAG + agent workflows... grounded data, audit trails, guardrails, human-in-the-loop.

Teaser post on LinkedIn: bit.ly/4qQiyCo

OpenClaw: The Viral AI Agent that Broke the Internet - Peter Steinberger | Lex Fridman Podcast #491 | David vonThenen I listened to the latest Lex Fridman Podcast episode: 𝐎𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐂𝐥𝐚𝐰: 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐕𝐢𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐀𝐈 𝐀𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐁𝐫𝐨𝐤𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐏𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐒𝐭𝐞𝐢𝐧𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐠𝐞𝐫. If you're building agents, it's worth a listen. OpenClaw has exploded on GitHub. But what stood out to me was this (time: 23:26): 𝐀𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐰𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐦𝐨𝐝𝐢𝐟𝐲 𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐨𝐰𝐧 𝐬𝐨𝐟𝐭𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐞… 𝐈 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐛𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐭 𝐢𝐭… 𝐢𝐭 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐝. We're not talking about scripted automation anymore. We're talking about systems that change themselves. That's impressive. It's also a different level of power. Midway through, Lex raises the obvious issue (time: 52:50): 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐭 𝐢𝐧𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐢𝐬 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐚𝐧 𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐧 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐦… 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞'𝐬 𝐬𝐨 𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐲 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬… 𝐧𝐮𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐯𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐬. Peter talks about progress, like scanning skills with VirusTotal. That's good. But the bigger point remains. OpenClaw is a privileged automation runtime. Your risk is dominated by: 1️⃣ Credential exposure 2️⃣ Network exposure 3️⃣ Tool/skill supply chain 4️⃣ Prompt injection and social engineering You're basically giving a script sudo on your machine. Except now it improvises. Please see: https://bit.ly/4aFyXDn And hopefully, you read the docs and you aren't running this on your actual machine, but some isolated cloud instance, VM, etc. To run OpenClaw safely, Peter's advice is clear (time: 1:00:45): 𝐈𝐟 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐨𝐧𝐥𝐲 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐨𝐧 𝐰𝐡𝐨 𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐤𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐢𝐭… 𝐢𝐧 𝐚 𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐧𝐞𝐭𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤… 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐤 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐟𝐢𝐥𝐞 𝐟𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐬 𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐲. Isolation is the safe move. And here's my 2 cents... If you isolate OpenClaw or any AI assistant completely... no personal data, no real integrations, no privileged API keys... how useful is it really? An AI assistant only becomes valuable when it knows who you are and can act on your behalf. That requires access. And access creates risk. Without that, you have a cool demo. Not a production system. Not a 𝐬𝐚𝐟𝐞 AI assistant. I think it could be useful to perform long running tasks based on the knowledge contained within the LLM... those in the AI space with some know how, probably already have some equivalent of that. BUT, I have a feeling that with some of that OpenAI resource, a safe and production version might become a reality sooner rather than later. The episode is fascinating and very honest about both the power and the risks... and also some really really amazing piece of tech that is taking the internet by storm. Give it a listen (it's 3+ hours, but worth it): https://bit.ly/4c0iFra

Just listened to Lex Fridman w/OpenClaw's creator 🤯🤖 Self-modifying AI agents are here… and they're powerful.

But let's be real: security is a real concern 🔐⚠️ Privileged automation + access + personal info = serious risk.

I break it down here: bit.ly/4tTsmhJ 🚀

Excited to share that my talk was accepted for NDC Copenhagen! I'll be presenting The Sound of Your Secrets: Teaching Your Model to Spy, So You Can Learn to Defend.


🗓️ Session Time/Date: Thurs, Jun 4 at 15:00
📍 Location: Room 4
📖 Session Link: bit.ly/4qvPWxT

Three weeks out and I can't wait to bring this one to @socallinuxexpo.bsky.social 23x in Pasadena, CA 🎧🔐

Check out my session: The Sound of Your Secrets: Teaching Your Model to Spy, So You Can Learn to Defend

🗓️ Sat, March 7 @ 14:30
📍 Room 101
🔗 bit.ly/4rlTiEP

#SCaLE23x