This is the one presentation that does repeat Austin. Zytans Ian Lennon (CPO) and John Rooney (Dev Engagement Manager) introduced their new VS Code agentic spider builder to the audience in Dublin. 

John first gave a tech demo where he wrote a quick spider to scrape and structure some e-commerce pages. Ian then took over and addressed the bigger picture from the business point of view. The extension is free for now, so we recommend giving it a go to see if it works for you. We were told that it’s already saved a lot of dev resources in Zyte’s internal use. 

As for the talk, we suggest watching the Austin version. John executed the demonstration live, which unfortunately resulted in the LLM executing itself mid-process. But even companies like Meta don’t always get live demos 100% right, so we respect John for his bravery.

The inimitable Sanaea Daruwalla, Zyte’s Chief Legal Officer, invited three more lawyers to talk about intellectual property in the age of AI. Its panelist Nikos Callum came from the F500 company Wesco, Dr Bernd Justin Jutte of University College Dublin represented academia, while Callum Henry works alongside Sanaea for Zyte. 

The discussion revolved around relevant legislation and legal concepts. It explored the EU’s AI act with its concept of risk tiers. We found it baffling that the level of risk should be self-assessed, and that this doesn’t apply to personal AI use. According to the panelists, the EU’s opt out requirement may also cause challenges, as there’s no set format for this procedure. 

We also had the chance to learn about US law, in particular its concept of fair use. Finally, the participants discussed some recent high-profile cases, namely the Anthropic book lawsuit and Getty vs Stability AI. It seems like so far judges have tended to favor AI companies in interpreting transformative use, but nothing has been set in stone yet. 

The panel discussion ended on a funny note: when it comes to giving legal advice on web scraping, large language models are much more cautious than even lawyers! Go figure. All in all, this one is highly recommended.

Iván Sánchez, senior data engineer at Zyte, described his company’s use of LLMs for data parsing. It complements and narrows down on Ian’s (Talk 4) high-level overview of Zyte’s AI capabilities. 

Iván first introduced the reasoning behind using LLMs at all. He then went on to address the major challenges that arise in implementing the models, such as optimizing token use and devising evaluation metrics. I’ve learned a lot: that it takes relatively few samples to train a model, that you can save money by only selecting relevant regions of a page, and that models become funky way below their maximum token limit. Recommended.

The final talk of the day featured Andrea Squatrito from Data Boutique, a data marketplace. It consisted of two halves. The first tried to substantiate data marketplaces using arguments that apply to most platforms: mostly economies of scale and easier distribution. The second half was more interesting, as it addressed the challenges of trust and quality assurance. AI was only mentioned in passing.