May 14th Meetup: The Inner Workings of AI with David Etlinger [Nerds Like Me]
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May 14th Meetup: The Inner Workings of AI with David Etlinger

May
14
Thursday
Thursday, May 14th, 2026 • 7:15PM to 9:30PM (CDT)
Address Info
Available on RSVP acceptance

Event Ended

This event has already taken place.

Gallery Survey Recap
Attendees 58+ registered
Attendees include leaders from Meta, Siemens, and AbbVie, featuring a Microsoft MVP and a mathematics Ph.D. specializing in production machine learning, with data science and AI/ML as the most common skills, followed by Power BI and SQL.

Nerds Like Me – May Meetup

Welcome to our next gathering of AI, data, and product enthusiasts. Expect lively conversation, hands-on demos, and plenty of opportunities to grow your network.

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Event Details

  • Date: May 14th
  • Time: 7:15 PM to 9:15 PM
  • Location: Highland Park, IL (exact venue shared after you RSVP)

You can order food and beverages at this venue!

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Featured Speaker: David Etlinger

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Bio:
David Etlinger is a researcher, scholar, and free thinker. Recently, he was with Meta Reality Labs Research, developing virtual acoustics platforms for VR and AR. Etlinger is a systems practitioner in many domains with an interest in feedback and technology diffusion. An audio and acoustics expert, he has designed the sonic landscape for hundreds of projects in the built environment, and worked in recording studios with innovative artists. His computing journey began with HyperCard stacks on a black-and-white Mac Plus, which instilled the belief that creativity lies in making unexpected connections.

Discussion:
How do Large Language Models (LLMs) really work? Despite their widespread usage, we do not fully understand their inner mechanisms and emergent properties. Interpretability is the quest to look under the hood of AI systems and directly observe their operation. This talk will give an overview of the field of interpretability, in the broader context of artificial cognition. We will concretely demonstrate techniques for inspecting and modifying the behavior of LLMs. What can this tell us about what LLMs are, and are not, capable of? What are the implications for alignment, reasoning abilities, and limitations of LLM architectures? Interpretability offers both tantalizing progress and significant open challenges for the future of AI.

(Photo) A group of people are gathered for a social event in an outdoor brewery patio area featuring string lights and banners. Text: STEEP RAVINE BREWING COMPANY SRB social gathering at a brewery | outdoor patio | multiple people, brewery branding, string lights, patio furniture | candid | Colors: #5e6b5e, #d1603d, #f2f2f2, #2e2e2e Note: This is a real-world photograph capturing a candid scene of people in a physical environment.

Sponsorship: Solving IT

The first round of drinks is sponsored by Solving IT. Solving IT is a Chicago-based boutique firm providing IT recruiting and Salesforce consulting services to help organizations build stronger teams and maximize their technology investments.

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What You Can Do Now

  1. RSVP – reserve your seat HERE
  2. Subscribe for updates: https://nerdslikeme.dream.page
  3. Complete your profile – we’ll use it in an upcoming session to spark deeper conversation.
  4. Whitelist us – add [email protected] to your contacts so you never miss an invite.
  5. Help spread the word – like, comment, or reshare this post on LinkedIn to help others discover Nerds Like Me and grow the community.

See you soon, both familiar faces and first-timers alike.

Jonathan Shertok
Organizer, Nerds Like Me

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