October 15, 2023 — This talk offers a comprehensive understanding of how AI can enhance your website management and free you from routine tasks like a genie granting a wish. You are invited to re-imagine your approach to website management, using new tools and knowledge to adapt and thrive in an AI-empowered landscape.

Whether you are a WordPress pro or beginner, this session will open your eyes to the power of AI automation with ChatGPT.

Presentation Slides »

October 13, 2023 — Large Language Models are the technology behind ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and more. They are weird and somewhat intimidating pieces of technology: we’re still trying to figure out how they work and what they can do, in a field that changes radically on an almost weekly basis.

In this talk I’ll break down how they work, what they’re useful for, what you can build with them and how to dodge their many pitfalls.

I’ll show you how to run surprisingly capable models on your laptop, and demonstrate techniques like semantic search and retrieval augmented generation which harness LLMs to help unlock the value in your own data.
I’ll also talk about their many limitations, including new classes of security vulnerabilities that threaten applications built on top of them.

Exploring LLMs has made me more ambitious with the projects I take on. Used thoughtfully, LLMs can unlock new capabilities, both for us and for the communities that we build software to serve.

May 22, 2023 — 2022 was remarkable for the explosion of GenerativeAI technologies. DALL-E, MidJourney and Stable Diffusion blew our minds with their ability to generate images from text prompts.

Then ChatGPT came along and totally blew up the internet. We’ve seen all sorts of daily tools integrate these new generative AI technologies; from Github’s CoPilot through Notion and even CodeWP – a specialist WordPress code generator.

In this talk, David will explain briefly how these technologies work and how they fit into the broader landscape of both AI and technology trends more broadly. He’ll then cover some of the most impressive and coolest examples of the technology in use today.

This all sets the stage to discuss how GenerativeAI and WordPress intersect. These are technologies that will have a direct impact on the entire array of WordPress stakeholders, right from developers through to end users of WordPress-powered sites. As with any disruptive technology, we will see opportunities and threats. David will help the audience think more precisely about this disruption and how they might best maneuver to enjoy the benefits and avoid the downsides.

These technologies are only going to get more impressive; let’s use them to make WordPress even better!