Generative AI in the form of large language models and their chatbot interfaces has become something that we must live with and which many people are interested in using. In addition to the spam, slop and disinformation, there exist some compelling use-cases for these chatbots in the service of targeted tasks: for example, providing advice on the naturalness of a sentence in your second language or extracting information from large number of PDFs which vary in their formatting.

In this workshop participants will learn:
How to access resources that deal with the many questions around the use and safety of large language models
How to choose between and understand the purpose of various models
How to setup a local LLM (run on your own computer, no connection to the internet, lower risk)
How to provide instructions to guide the behavior of a model
How to manage different models and custom chatbots
How to add to the background knowledge of a model using retrieval augmented generation (RAG)
What can be done to improve model performance on specific tasks (fine-tuning)

Participants should bring a laptop to which they have administrative or root access for the purpose of installing software!

Users with access to the gROW learning environment can find more information about workshops and courses offered by the Radboud Digital Competence Centre here.