Harness the True Sovereign AI w/ ConfidentialMind

Join Thinkin’Rocks and ConfidentialMind for a hands-on evening exploring open-weight language models, private AI infrastructure, and practical application development. During the workshop, participants will see and get temporary access to ConfidentialMind’s private cloud environment and work directly with self-hosted models. We’ll cover the basics of model deployment, inference, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), before moving into hands-on experimentation. You’ll be able to build a small prototype using OpenAI-compatible endpoints and see how the same application architecture can work with privately hosted models instead of relying entirely on public cloud AI services. The session is designed for students, developers, and anyone curious about how organizations can use modern AI while keeping greater control over their data and infrastructure. No previous experience with hosting LLMs is required. The workshop is led by Akshay Jain @ ConfidentialMind, Senior AI Research Engineer, IEEE Senior Member, ex-Nokia Bell Labs, Former Marie Curie Fellow. 17:00 - 17:15 Arrival17:15 - 17:40 Introduction to self-hosted AI and open-weight models17:40 - 18:00 Live walkthrough of the ConfidentialMind environment18:00 - 19:00 Hands-on building session19:00 - 19:15 Snacks break19:15 - 20:00 Prototyping, demos and discussion