πŸ—οΈ 🚒 πŸš€ Arcee AI's AFM-4.5B & Typedef's Fenic


COMING UP THIS WEEK

gpt-oss: The Frontier of Open-Weight Reasoning Models

​OpenAI just dropped gpt-oss, their first open-weight LLM since GPT-2. In this session, we'll unpack what’s inside the 120B and 20B variants: agent-friendly tool use and CoT strengths, long-context (128k), MoE FFNs, GQA, the SFT+RL training pipeline, and the safety work behind the release (including the new risk-assessment paper). We’ll also cover the tokenizer/prompting stack (o200k_harmony + harmony format), compare performance and β€œvibe” to other leading models, and share practical takeaways for production. RSVP here.

EVENT RECAPS

Arcee AI's AFM-4.5B

We met the Arcee Foundation Model 4.5B β€” an American-made, open-weight SLM. CTO Lucas Atkins walked us through how it was made, from architecture tweaks (GQA, ReLUΒ²), to curating 8T tokens with Datology AI, to the role of mid-training to post-training with SFT plus RLVR/GRPO and KTO. Check it out to get down in the weeds.

Typedef's Fenic

The latest cute, furry animal (e.g., pandas, polars) to jump onto the DataFrame scene in an LLM-powered world is Fenic. We were joined by Founding Engineer Rohit Rastogi for a deep cut on the future of production data processing. A true LLM edge event.

COMING UP NEXT

AWS Agent Squad

​Join us as we dig into AWS’s open-source Agent Squadβ€”a multi-agent orchestration framework that routes requests via a global β€œClassifier” while preserving conversation context. We’ll demo how it plugs into AWS-native tools compare it with other popular frameworks. Featuring AWS’s Milan McGraw and Aravind Subramanian, this session is ideal for engineers and AI leaders choosing their next agent stack.

RLVR

​Join us for Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards [Ref]β€”a fast, practical primer on how verifiers drive reward training for tasks with checkable outcomes. We’ll cut through the hype after DeepSeek-R1/GRPO, highlight where RLVR excels (math, coding, instruction following) and where it struggles, and tour fresh 2025 research. Ideal for AI engineers and leaders looking to fine-tune off-the-shelf models with better cost/perf.

The AI Engineering Bootcamp

Cohort 8 of The AI Engineering Bootcamp launches soon. Crush The AI Engineering Challenge and enroll today to get immediate access to Mastermind sessions ahead of the cohort kickoff on September 9.

Keep building πŸ—οΈ shipping 🚒 and sharing πŸš€, and we'll do the same!

​Dr. Greg, The Wiz, and Team
​AI Makerspace​

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