Takeaways from GDG Berlin: Building with AI at Google's Berlin Office

In April, I had the opportunity to attend the GDG Berlin "Build with AI" event at Google's Berlin office. It was a great evening to connect with other engineers and the local ML/AI community, and to get first-hand insights into where the field is heading.

Some of my personal highlights:

• Patrick Löber (Google DevRel) was sharing how Google continues to heavily invest in pushing the limits of AI, both in terms of model capabilities and the surrounding software ecosystem. Their advances in multimodal and agentic capabilities with Gemini and Gemma are impressive.

• Ines Montani (Explosion.ai) shared practical lessons from the tools she built at Explosion (like spaCy and Prodigy) — real-world NLP tools I wish I had discovered earlier. 😬

• Tejas Kumar (DataStax DevRel) reminded us, with a refreshing and very human approach, that AI engineering is more accessible than it sometimes seems. This made me realize that I am already part of this space.

Thanks to GDG Berlin and the organizers for putting together a strong event. Looking forward to the next one!