January 2025 Edition: The Year of the Builder
Your monthly guide to the AI industry's most impactful events in NYC
💡 Quick Take: With the new AI products releases coming in at the end of the year, I’m sure many of you are as excited and confused as I do - what can I do now? where are we headed? It’s hard to say for sure, but agentic AI is definite up and coming!
💫 2024 Recap & 2025 Outlook
As we bid farewell to 2024, we witnessed remarkable advancements in AI development - from multimodal breakthroughs to enhanced reasoning capabilities, to agentic AI and amazing text-to-video models. But 2025 marks one pivotal shift: The Rise of Agentic AI.
What previously took months of development can now be accomplished in weeks with AI assistance, and potentially days with Agentic AI. However, it's crucial to understand that current Agentic AI typically gets us 60-70% of the way to a minimum viable product. The remaining 30-40% - the refinement, optimization, and deep integration - still requires human expertise and experience.
This is why 2025 is the Year of the Builder. Success lies not in relying solely on AI, but in skillfully combining human insight with AI capabilities. Our mission is to empower you with the knowledge and tools to thrive in this new paradigm!
🌟 This Month’s Highlights
[Special Partnership] Learn about what is AI and how it works with Superlinear Academy (10% off for subscribers).
[Featured Talk] AI and the Future of Lawmaking: Innovation at the Library of Congress with Natalie Buda Smith (Jan.23rd)
📅 January Calendar
Application Series: Leveraging AI to Solve Your Issues!
[Jan 9, 19:00 EST, MIT] AI and Trust | Virtual
[Jan 10, 12:00 EST, MIT] AI revolution in HR: Unveiling skills in the modern job market | Virtual
[Jan 16, 12:00 EST, MIT] Mitigating the danger of AI | Virtual
[Jan 21, 14:00 EST, MIT] Aligning Innovation and Equity in the Digital Economy | Virtual
[Jan 22, 12:00 EST, MIT] Data deletion in AI systems: The illusion of erasure and its privacy implications | Virtual
[Jan 23, 17:00 EST, Northeastern] AI and the Future of Lawmaking: Innovation at the Library of Congress with Natalie Buda Smith | Virtual
Beyond AI: Get Interdisciplinary insights!
[Jan 30, 18:30 EST, Columbia University] A Fireside Chat with Anthony Fauci, M.D. | Virtual
🤝 Community Spotlight
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🛠️ Builder's Corner: Spinning Up Your Local AI Server
From our previous workshop with Sanctum.ai and Dr. Yan Wang from Superlinear Academy, many of the audience asked about how to set up a local AI server.
This may sound like a daunting task - having to navigate through the models, the stacks, the web UI, the API …… But worry not! What would have taken days for you now takes minutes! I have taken the liberty to create a walk through on setting up local AI servers.
So… what exactly did I do?
I instructed cursor (an AI-powered IDE) to set up a local AI server for me using ollama and openwebui, recording it’s actions in development record
It set up both tools and tried to download mistra (my mac is not sufficient to support), so I told it to use llama - which turns out it doesn’t work too
I relayed the insight to cursor, and it helped me choosing tinyllama
…and it worked!
The entire process took me ~12 mins, 5 of which were spent on downloads. Video editing actually too me ~40 mins, and music was generated using suno! To save your time, here are my prompts:
> Create development record. I want to spin up a local webpage for AI models. I want to use openwebui + ollama, provide a full implementation plan in the record
> proceed (X2)
> start with llama
> start serving the modelOccasionally AI would slack off, in which case you would need to tell it to go on : D Now, there are more tricks that I personally use, which might warrant an article of its own. One tip I would give though, is always use github (or any version control) when using agentic AI - so when it messes things up, we can roll it back confidently!