AI Around Town, FoCo & NoCo Edition: The Fort Collins AI for Everyone Meetup and the NoCo AI Group

Phil Nugent -

Closely connected to the attention Fort Collins is receiving for its upcoming, four-day Founded in FoCo conference - and which for the first time, features an AI track - the AI meetup scene in the city is also bubbling over.

Three of the original founders of the NoCo AI Group - Dayle Wickizer, Patrick Padden, and Phil Metzger - are presenting at Founded in FoCo this week. In fact, Wickizer is appearing twice, speaking on "Harnessing AI Responsibly" and also appearing on a panel discussion of "AI Unplugged: Real-Time Insights and Trends." (See the Colorado AI News story here on the Founded in FoCo conference, which starts Monday, March 10.)

To avoid overexposure - or perhaps, exhaustion - the NoCo AI Group will not have an official meeting this month, but it's a good guess that you'll be able to find many of its members at Founded in FoCo. Look for NoCo AI to resume its meetups in April. None are yet scheduled, but the group often meets at the restaurant Avogadro's Number, providing members with a casual setting for NoCo's AI Networking and Discussion Series.

For those looking for something more structured, one of the newer Rocky Mountain AI Interest Group (RMAIIG) subgroups is the Fort Collins AI for Everyone Meetup, which now has gotten together six times since last October, with an ever-expanding group of attendees.

The organizer of the group, Andres Sepulveda Morales, talked with Colorado AI News about how he had attended a few of RMAIIG's large-group and smaller subgroup meetings in Boulder last year, prompting him to want to put together an AI group in Fort Collins that was similarly focused on presentations and education-related content.

Andres Sepulveda Morales, MC'ing the March 3rd AI for Everyone Meetup in Fort Collins. (Photo courtesy of Nicole Annen.)
Presenters Matthew Cicanese, Jay Swartz, and Steve Kommrusch take questions at the March 3rd AI for Everyone Meetup. (Photo courtesy of Andres Sepulveda Morales.)

At the group's March 3 meeting, three speakers tackled the topic of how to use AI effectively and safely:

First, Steve Kommrusch, career researcher and AI safety advocate, offered an industry overview of both AI tools and AI safety, providing context with examples of AI models and current events, and ended with his prediction as to how - just like chess-playing robots - AI will continue to improve. 

Next up was Jay Swartz, who has a deep background in technical implementation and data science. He walked the group through his concept of being "Lost in (Latent) Space." Essentially, he provided insights into how to interact with LLMs, and suggested that understanding the process of how these models function can help one better interact with them. 

The presentations wrapped up with Matthew Cicanese, who modeled how to implement these concepts at a tactical level with Perplexity. He then demonstrated key prompt templates for how he's utilized Perplexity in business to dramatically increase his productivity. Matt recorded his presentation, which you can find below or on his YouTube channel.

The next meeting of "Fort Collins AI for Everyone" is scheduled for Monday, April 7. Its theme is Holistic AI Impact, and more information can be found on its Meetup page.