🚀 Data Sanity Talks Belgrade — October 4 is approaching!

🎤 Hear from global experts on the latest in AI & Machine Learning
👥 Connect with professionals shaping the future of tech & business
🗯 Join discussions on today’s most important (and fun!) AI topics

📍 Meet at Startit Centar Belgrade

➡ Sign up now!
🌍 datasanity.dev

💡 Training LLMs is insanely expensive — one run of Llama 3 cost an estimated $52M and took ~70 days on 16K GPUs. Every small optimization saves millions.

🖥 Longer context windows are a hot research race — they promise simpler workflows and infrastructure, but real performance gains are still limited. Big Tech and startups are betting heavily here.

⚡️ Reasoning costs are the next frontier — methods like speculative decoding, smaller distilled models, and even new chips (3,000 tokens/sec vs ~300 on GPUs) aim to make “thinking” cheaper.

This is what we learned from the talk “LLMs Are Expensive — Here's How Big Tech Makes Them Less So” by Max Shaposhnikov, Research Engineer @ Tessl, ex-Applied Scientist @ Amazon Research

Find other useful insights in the full video:
https://youtu.be/DLsm2WEglSc?si=OHf6ENOWYq5-3ZaY

Data Sanity Talks Belgrade: Call 4 Posters

There are 1-2 spots available on a first-come, first-served basis to:
1. Present your AI project during a poster session. Apply here!
2. Give a mini-talk or lead a discussion on a hot AI topic. Apply here!

🗓 October 4 | 12:00 — 22:00
📍 Belgrade, Startit Centar
🎟 Info & Tickets: datasanity.dev

🚀 New Speaker at Data Sanity Talks 🚀

"AI Meets Healthcare: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly"
This is a keynote topic by Ivan Drokin, Head of Applied ML @ Moonvalley.ai, joining us from Montenegro.
Ivan will talk about how AI is used in healthcare — what really works, what doesn’t, and the tricky parts in between.

🗓 October 4 | 12:00 — 22:00
📍 Belgrade, Startit Centar
🎟 Info & Tickets: https://datasanity.dev/

🚀 Our next speaker for Data Sanity Talks! 🚀

Elena Ericheva — AI scientist at JetBrains, flying in from Montenegro ✈️
Her talk: "Mesa Optimisation in Large Models and AI Safety"
Elena will explain what happens when big AI systems start behaving in ways we didn’t directly plan for — and why that matters for keeping them safe to use.

🗓 October 4 | 12:00 — 22:00
📍 Belgrade, Startit Centar
🎟 Info & Tickets: https://datasanity.dev/

Here is a video from our recent event:

To AI or Not to AI? Integration & Adoption Case Study

Paul Katurov dives into:

🟢 How is AI being integrated into different processes and departments within a company?
🟢 What challenges might you face?
🟢 When is it better to rely on humans?

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You can get more practical insights and personally ask AI experts about your specific topic at the upcoming Data Sanity Talks Belgrade on October 4.

🚀 Info & Tickets: datasanity.dev

🌟 Meet our next speaker: Mariya Zlenko 🌟

AI Product Director at Uralsib, joining us from Azerbaijan ✈️
In her talk, “Launching AI in Conservative Corporations: Turning Skepticism into Value”, Mariya will share her experience of bringing AI to a place where people are sceptical about the new technology, and what she's learned along the way.


🗓 October 4 | 12:00 — 22:00
📍 Belgrade, Startit Centar
🎟 Info & Tickets: https://datasanity.dev/

🔹 Spotlight on our next speaker: Dušan Zamurović 🔹

Engineering Manager at Foursquare, Dušan will talk about “Building a Data Platform as a Single Source of Truth”.

This talk shares a real-world journey of building an AWS-based, event-driven data processing platform that matured from backend infrastructure into a company-wide self-service hub. It highlights key technical steps, cultural shifts, and DS/DE collaboration that built trust and empowered business teams to explore and act on data.

🗓 October 4 | 12:00 — 22:00
📍 Belgrade, Startit Centar
🎟 Info & Tickets: https://datasanity.dev/

🤖💀 To AI, or not to AI: that is the question.
Whether ’tis wiser in the mind to embrace
The promises and perils of this novel tech,
Or to resist the tide of change,
And by resisting, be left behind?

Explore this very question — not in verse, but through talks, discussions, posters, and networking with experts from Microsoft, Meta, JetBrains, Foursquare and more!

🎟 Secure your spot now with 25% off tickets, code DATASANITYFLASH25 (valid until Sept 25).

🗓 October 4 | 12:00 — 22:00
📍 Startit Centar Belgrade
➡️ Event Agenda & Tickets: datasanity.dev

💡 Next on the list 💡

Aleksandar Anđelković — Principal Engineering Manager @ Microsoft

In his talk “A Practical Guide to LLM Context Engineering”, Alexandar introduces a practical framework to overcome LLM context limits by selecting, compressing, and structuring information with RAG, summarization, memory, and agentic workflows to build smarter, more reliable AI applications.

✨️️️️️ Your exclusive 25% off is waiting — unlock it with code DATASANITYFLASH25, today only.

🗓 October 4 | 12:00 — 22:00
📍 Startit Centar Belgrade
➡️ Event Agenda & Tickets: datasanity.dev

✨ Another awesome speaker ✨

Stanislav Tsepa — ML Engineer @ FAANG, flying in from the UK ✈️

In his talk “When LLMs Train Your Models: Using AI to Build Better AI” Stanislav will show how AI can actually help create smarter AI — from cleaning noisy datasets and prompt-optimization to generating synthetic data and distilling knowledge into smaller models. Stanislav will also give us practical examples of using LLM-judge, automatic label generation, and active learning with LLMs to boost real-world pipelines.

🎟 Don’t miss out: 25% off tickets with code DATASANITYFLASH25, valid until the day ends.

🗓 October 4 | 12:00 — 22:00
📍 Startit Centar Belgrade
➡️ Event Agenda & Tickets: datasanity.dev