BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:icalendar-ruby
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
X-WR-CALNAME:Under the Hood: The Math\, the Magic\, and the Messy Reality o
 f Large Language Models
X-WR-TIMEZONE:Pacific Time (US & Canada)
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20260521T194333Z
UID:tag:localist.com\,2008:EventInstance_52535934423484
DTSTART:20260413T230000Z
DTEND:20260414T000000Z
DESCRIPTION:You've used ChatGPT. You've probably been amazed\, and maybe a 
 little unsettled\, by what it can do. But what is actually happening when 
 you hit send? In this talk\, Todd Hendry (Whitman '00\, Partner Software E
 ngineer at Microsoft) pulls back the curtain on large language models\, ex
 plaining how they are trained on vast corpora of text\, what "learning" ac
 tually means mathematically\, and why building and evaluating these system
 s at scale is harder than it looks. We will touch on the core ideas\, incl
 uding transformers\, loss functions\, and reinforcement learning from huma
 n feedback\, without requiring anything beyond calculus and curiosity. Tod
 d will share what it is like to work at the intersection of Microsoft and 
 OpenAI\, along with the kinds of problems that researchers and engineers a
 re actively working on.
LOCATION:Olin\, 157
SUMMARY:Under the Hood: The Math\, the Magic\, and the Messy Reality of Lar
 ge Language Models
URL;VALUE=URI:https://calendar.whitman.edu/event/under-the-hood-the-math-th
 e-magic-and-the-messy-reality-of-large-language-models
CATEGORIES:Science\, Engineering & Technology
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR