Together with over 50 guests from Linz and the surrounding area, Jan Koutnik discussed current developments in AI. And most visitors probably remembered the image of the onion and the LLMs. The more you peel the onion, the more you cry. The same applies to LLMs, joked Koutnik.
The AI pioneer “Czeched out” in 2009 to improve recurrent neural networks and scale evolutionary reinforcement learning as a postdoc at IDSIA. At NNAISENSE, he directed the division of the company responsible for the “learning to park” NeurIPS 2016 demo with Audi, the “learning to run” NeurIPS competition win in 2017, and the Festo Softhand in-hand manipulation demo at Hannover Messe in 2019. Today, he works at his own company on Blue Collar AI—AI that “has to get its hands dirty.”
The next "KI Punsch" event will take place in February 2026.
