'AI will be seismic'

The word “hacking” typically conjures up images of intelligence agencies, spies and Hollywood scenes of super nerds infiltrating “mainframes.” But hacking for most programmers is actually synonymous with “building” or solving a specific problem.

And that’s what members of the Coeur d’Alene Machine Learners Club did Thursday, Dec. 14, during the club’s third “Hackathon” at the Innovation Collective Den in Coeur d’Alene. 

From 4 p.m. until after midnight, 12 participants of the Machine Learners Club rushed to complete demos they could present, which addressed important issues or offered improvements on existing technology leveraging the power of artificial intelligence.

Their pitches ranged from AI-powered email sorting, to improving data retrieval systems for AI, to creating a comedy-bot. One pitch proposed training security cameras to automatically identify whether a person at the front door was suspicious or a friend or family member.

Participants ranged from web developers with decades of experience to high school students. One such student, Marcus Davis, bought a robot online months ago and used the hackathon as an opportunity to learn how to program and improve it.

“Did you see that?” he exclaimed at one point as the robot was able to take directions from a file created by ChatGPT.

The Coeur d’Alene Machine Learners Club is a group for hobbyists, enthusiasts and professionals, but the depth of specialized AI knowledge in the group sometimes surprises long-time residents as well as recent transplants.

“When we left Seattle, one of the things that worried us most is that we wouldn’t have the same tech meet-ups that we were used to,” said David Fry, a member of the club. “We were surprised to find something like this that is as good if not better than anything we had over there.”

Josh Freckleton, who started the group one year ago as a casual get-together between friends, is excited about what the group will do in the future. 

“AI will be seismic,” Freckleton said. “Our goal is to help our community understand and adopt this tech because the most wholesome future is one where this power is distributed, not concentrated.” 

The group was founded at an ideal time. The Spokane-Coeur d’Alene area was recently designated one of 31 tech hubs across the nation as a part of the CHIPS Act from a pool of 400 applications.

Participants presented their demos at 10:30 p.m., which included a “Pocket Jesus” AI trained on data from gotquestions.org, improving the vectorization and retrieval of data, and a way to run a large language model hyper-efficiently on a local machine. One participant demonstrated how they were using AI to streamline dispatch systems that could be used for freight. 

The demos were small steps toward solving big problems, but they proved that building solutions with like-minded people can be fun and that there is a deep well of tech talent in the area.

The Coeur d’Alene Machine Learners Club meets at 4 p.m. Wednesdays in the basement of the Innovation Den. 

Learn more about the group at CdaAI.org.