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Building an LLM from scratch in 60 minutes - with Bart De Smet

Thursday, 5 November 2026 • 18:00
TBD, Antwerpen

Agenda

  • 18:00 — Welcome with catering
  • 18:30 — Session 1
  • 19:30 — Networking

Sessions

Building an LLM from scratch in 60 minutes

Armed with nothing but C# and the .NET libraries, we'll endeavor on a whirlwind tour to build a toy GPT-like LLM from scratch.

Expect a hardcore deep dive coding session that demystifies the essential building blocks of LLMs, including tokenization, embeddings, layers, self-attention, transformers, auto-differentiation, gradient descent, and more.

By the end of the session, we'll train our LLM on a corpus of text and attempt to have a meaningful - or gibberish - conversation with it.

Bart De Smet
Bart De Smet

Originally from Belgium, Bart relocated to work at the Microsoft headquarters in 2007 after graduating from Ghent University while being a C# MVP. After having worked on WPF and .NET for a few years, Bart focused on reactive programming for quite some time, helping to build Reactive Extensions (Rx) and large scale event processing systems powering various cloud services. After a brief stint in AutoML focusing on Python performance tuning, Bart is now focusing on building next generation distributed systems in the office of the CTO."

Practical information

Location: TBD, Antwerp