There are a lot of convenient & cheap ways to learn about AI, but most of them come with strings attached. Usually, free AI services use your data to train their AI models - a privacy nightmare.

Instead of relying on proprietary AI providers, you can take advantage of open-source software and open weight models to learn AI concepts while maintaining your privacy.

In this talk, I'll share the setup I use, giving a lightning-fast tour of many open source projects that can be used to learn about AI engineering at home, with a focus on inference with small models, image generation and recognition, and basic observability.