playgroup - nanoGPT and friends
Schedule
Fri Feb 06 2026 at 09:30 am to 05:00 pm
UTC+00:00Location
Prospero House | London, EN
About this Event
playgroup is a 1 day deep dive into 'the edge of LLMs', in this (4th) iteration we're looking at nanoGPT, finetuning and maybe also nanochat.
The focus will be on digging into how transformers work, swapping excellent visualisations, training our own models (I'll rent some GPUs for nanoGPT (the GPT 2-equivalent)) and maybe even trying nanochat (the GPT 3.5-equivalent). If you want to know 'where the limit is' and how to edge into it, attend this day.
We'll co-create solutions to the questions that are raised at the start of the day, we'll do a lot of collaboration, you'll get to meet everyone as the day progresses. Attendees are curious individuals and you'll be interested in meeting lots of curious minds.
Key points
- code (github), a shared workspace and LLM credits are provided
- the lovely venue offers hot breakfast, hot lunch and snacks throughout the day
- key aspects include - problem solving in groups, show-and-tells with tooling & process that attendees are using (e.g. Codex, Cursor, Claude Code), discussion about your issues, lots of networking with fellow cutting-edge attendees
- the event runs at-cost (organiser Ian makes no money)
About you - you've been using LLMs for over a year, you use them weekly either to write code or inside a product (ideally - you do both). You've seen them work well and poorly and you're curious to know where 'the edge is' and to learn new ways to deal with unreliable results. You want to collaborate with peers to learn new processes, see new tools and share insights.
Write-ups:
- 2025-11 See Chris' write-up here on making GPT funny
- 2025-09 LinkedIn here and here on ARC AGI 2025
- 2025-06 LinkedIn here and here on ARC AGI 2025
At the first event I had a selection of heads of data science and senior data scientists, all hands-on with LLMs, here's what they said:
Ian did a great job organising people who work in LLMs. We all worked on a challenging problem, and discussed if LLMs will really be taking over the world coming to different conclusions. The discussion put a lot of the ideas into perspective. Thank you very much!
Want to accelerate your ability to tackle the toughest challenges with LLMs? Make sure you get yourself to one of Ian's LLM playgroups (Sam)
Bouncing ideas around with this carefully selected group gave me a lot to think about and the courage to put new things into practice. (David)
Joining this course is the best way I know to make sure you're up to date with what's possible with LLMs. You get a good intuition for where your understanding is and if there are any tricks or perspectives you might be missing (Ben)
I got the opportunity to meet others in the industry and discuss the various issues we were facing. (Adam)
Where is it happening?
Prospero House, 241 Borough High Street, London, United KingdomEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
GBP 129.05 to GBP 3209.21
