Inside AI Models with Ben O’Mahony
Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.
See what today’s AI models can really do
New AI models are emerging rapidly, each with distinct capabilities, trade-offs, and practical uses. In Inside AI Models with Ben O’Mahony, Ben interviews the people behind them, from small and large language models to vision, speech, audio, embedding, reasoning, and coding models. Hear the thinking behind key design decisions, explore where each model excels and where it struggles, and watch guests put their models to work in practical live demos. Along the way, Ben and his guests examine trade-offs involving quality, speed, cost, privacy, customization, and deployment to help you decide whether a model belongs in your AI stack.
What you’ll learn and how you can apply it
- Understand what each featured model was designed to do and which workloads it may be best suited for
- Evaluate practical trade-offs involving quality, speed, cost, privacy, customization, and deployment
- Learn how to get started with the model and determine whether it belongs in your AI stack
This live event is for you because...
- You’re a developer, data professional, technical lead, or AI practitioner evaluating models for real-world applications.
- You want practical demonstrations and expert guidance without spending hours researching every new release.
- You need to choose the right-size model for your workload rather than defaulting to a larger general-purpose option
Prerequisites
Recommended follow-up:
- Read Hands-On Small Language Models (early release book)
- Read Domain-Specific Small Language Models (book)
- Take [Building AI Apps with Small Language Models](https://learning.oreilly.com/live-events/building-ai-apps-with-small-language-models-slms/0642572016289/) (live online course with Pratheerth Padman)
- Take: AI Models, Apps, and Harnesses in the Agentic Era: A Practical Guide to Selecting and Using the Right AI Tools for Real Work (Chatbots and Beyond) (on demand course with Lisa Becker)
- Read Vision Language Models (book)
- Read Hand-On Large Language Models (book)
- Read Fine-Tuning AI (book)
- Read Large Language Models: The Hard Parts (book)
Schedule
The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.
Wednesdays 8:00am PT / 11:00am ET
- Interactive discussion and Q&A (45 minutes)
Your Host
Ben O'Mahony
Ben O’Mahony is a results-driven AI and engineering leader with a track record of building high-performing teams and shipping business-critical AI, ML, and data platforms at scale. He has deep expertise across the full engineering and data lifecycle, from research to production deployment and is adept at defining technical strategy, driving execution, and partnering cross-functionally to deliver measurable impact. He’s currently writing Building AI Agent Platforms for O’Reilly, due to be published next spring, and available to read now in early release on the O’Reilly platform.