Local AI Changes Everything

GenAI Montréal @ Mirego
Local AI Changes Everything
GenAI Montréal is back at Mirego.
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\#\# Evening Schedule — Sept 8
Mirego — 18:00 PM Doors Open
\#\#\# 6:00 PM — Arrival & Networking
Meet members from GenAI Montréal
\#\#\# ️ 6:30 PM — Welcome

Introduction to GenAI Montréal
Spotlight on next /dev/mtl Conference
Overview of the evening

\#\#\# 6:45 PM — Talks Begin
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\#\# Speaker \#1
Jean-François René
Founder, Squid-OS
\#\#\# Bio
Jean-François René began coding at seven on an Apple IIe and has spent the last three decades as a builder, founder, and technology leader. Over ten years as CTO at ScalePad, he helped grow the company from its early days to more than 300 people, establishing the product, platform, and engineering foundations behind its growth.

A longtime open-source enthusiast, he is now returning to building from the ground up with Squid-OS, an open-source, local-first AI harness and agent runtime, while exploring how local AI is reshaping the way we interact with computers and build software.

\#\#\# Talk
A Journey to Local AI

Abstract
Running a capable AI model locally used to mean major compromises. That is changing quickly.

In this talk, Jean-François René shares his hands-on journey into local AI: experimenting with open-weight models, pushing consumer hardware to its limits, navigating quantization, context windows, inference engines and tool calling—and discovering that the most interesting question isn't whether a local model can compete with the cloud.

It's what becomes possible when the AI actually lives on your computer.

The journey eventually led to Squid-OS, an open-source experiment in treating AI as an interface to the operating system itself. What started as an exercise in optimizing models shifted toward questioning the software we build around them: how low latency changes the interaction loop, whether we really need to consume so many tokens or hardcode so many capabilities into our harnesses, how small, smart and univers