One Goal, One Squad

Welcome to the AI squad blog!

Starting the first post on a blog is always a tricky exercise, so I'll keep it simple and set the tone right away: we're fans of the Future and we want to help shape it!

Who Are We?

We are Reboot-Conseil, an IT and engineering company based in Strasbourg, and the site you're reading right now is a very special offshoot: the AI squad!

We are a group of five passionate developers, led by our CEO Yaniv Adjedj, and our mission is to change the way we work, deliver value to our clients and to the IT community at large, and build a community around AI.

What Is a Squad?

A Squad is a small, cross-functional team of 6 to 12 people who work on a chosen topic with full autonomy and responsibility, guided by clear, shared objectives. This Squad chose to dive headfirst into the world of Artificial Intelligence because, beyond just talking about it and using it, we now want to go further with a dedicated team focused on this theme.

Why the Squad?

This year has been marked by an incredible wave of innovations, representing one of the most disruptive technological paradigm shifts of our time. Among the many milestones of the year:

• March: Release of GPT-4, pushing the boundaries of NLP
• March: Announcement of Multitask Unified Model by Google, an AI capable of understanding and generating text, images, and even videos in multiple languages
• March: Launch of Google Bard, the free, connected, and constantly updated competitor to ChatGPT
• May: Microsoft announces Windows Copilot, an AI integrated into the operating system
• June: Update to Stable Diffusion, producing even more realistic photos
• August: Major fundraising round for Hugging Face, the platform leading the deployment of open-source LLMs, with investors including Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and more
• September: Release of IDEFICS, an open-source and multimodal LLM
• September: Microsoft files a patent for a "smart backpack" that can interact with its wearer through haptic signals
• ...

And that's just the tip of the iceberg of everything that has happened and is happening right now!

Every developer at Reboot is aware of this rapid acceleration of innovation, and we've all been experimenting individually with the various APIs, libraries, and models available in open source and on the market.

Some of us have created plugins for ChatGPT, image classifiers, a chatbot for our internal knowledge base, a tool to automatically summarize meetings, and more.

Ideas keep flowing, and we've reached the following conclusion: it's time to get organized and seize this AI turning point that drives us.

What Happens Next?

This experience is by definition new to us. We'll keep you regularly updated on our progress, our doubts, our approaches, our successes and achievements. Don't hesitate to join in on our discussions!