BRAIN: AI Applications & Tooling Meetup

Come share and learn how people are actually using AI in their day-to-day work, whether that's coding, engineering, creative projects, or solving business problems.

We skip the "what is AI" basics, focusing more on practical, real workflows, useful tools, and honest experiences. You don't need to be an AI expert, just curious to learn more.

This month Dr Rob Layton walks through what's actually changed under the hood of the LLM models we all use. The talk will go through:

• Mixture-of-Experts, which allows a trillion-parameter model to fire only a small slice of itself for any given token. How does the routing decide which experts handle what? What's new in 2026, from tuning sparsity specifically for reasoning to experts of different sizes for different jobs?

• Reinforcement learning. The DeepSeek-R1 line trains models to reason by rewarding good reasoning rather than just copying it, and kicked off the whole wave of "thinking" models.

• What is there beyond Transformers. State space models like Mamba, and newer systems mixed with Transformers and MoE for agentic work.

• Methods for dealing with long context, and on compression and sparse-attention tricks.

The big screen's up too. Anyone can present something cool they've found or a project they've been working on.

What to expect

• Main talk: a 45-60 minute feature talk on an emerging AI technology or a unique use-case.

• Lightning talks: stand up for five minutes and show how you use AI day to day, or a project you're excited about. Bring your own.

• News about BRAIN (the Ballarat Regional AI Network) and future meetups.

Who should come: anyone already tinkering with AI or ready to move beyond the basics. Developers, engineers, creators, and business folks are all welcome. Bring your laptop if you want to try things out.

Hosted by

Dr Rob Layton from BRAIN, the Ballarat Regional Artificial Intelligence Network. Rob has more than 15 years of experience working with AI, leads the Ballarat AI Meetups, and is a highly experienced technology trainer.

This is a collaboration between BRAIN (www.brain.net.au) and the Ballarat Hackerspace. We're planning more sessions, so let us know if you'd like to present your own AI workflow at a future meetup.

Tickets are required, so grab yours and we'll see you there.

New to AI, or after a friendlier intro? Come to the Ballarat AI Exchange instead. See the previous AI Exchange and the next AI Exchange.