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In the Press:
As AI cost and security concerns grow, CAN launches AI Workhorse to build secure nodes and reduce AI token costs for Nebraska companies
Recently our team had the chance to sit down with Lev from Silicon Prairie News to share how we are building local AI infrastructure for Omaha and Nebraska through AI Workhorse and a partnership with Scott Data Center.
Workhorse assembles the computer servers necessary to run AI models. In partnership with Scott Data Center, the nonprofit Omaha data center, that hardware is then securely made available to local companies.
“That enables us to put custom models on your workhorse,” Preston Badeer said. “So if you have specific models that you have built in-house, or we have security professionals that need to run models that normally you wouldn’t be allowed to run on cloud hardware… We’ll tune the model for the hardware, make sure it performs well and set you loose.”
Companies can get access to that hardware (often called a node) by working with CAN, or directly from Workhorse. And with specific training methods, cheaper AI models can be optimized to work just as well as the most expensive high-end models.
“I can walk into (Scott Data), point to a piece of hardware, and say ‘My model lives right there, and right there only,’” Watson said. “Nobody is getting your data.”
And my personal favorite part of this partnership:
As a bonus, for every five nodes that companies buy, Workhorse will donate one AI node to a nonprofit of their choice.
“It’s a crying shame that nobody has found a way to use AI meaningfully for social good yet,” Badeer said. “I wanted a model that would enable us to provide services to nonprofits that they didn’t previously have.”
While many nonprofits don’t have much of an IT department, access to a free AI node can open up a world of possibilities.
Read the full article on SPN.
Around the Data World
TabFM, a new foundation model for tabular data
This one's for the OG data scientists and ML engineers.
Last month, Google announced TabFM: A zero-shot foundation model for tabular data.
TabFM is using "in-context learning" to look at a brand-new table and make good predictions in a single pass. The model is able to learn a new task just by being shown examples in the prompt, rather than being retrained.
If you think "that sounds exactly like what AI does," you're not far off. But most LLMs are built to read one word after another, in order, like a sentence. A spreadsheet doesn't work that way; you can shuffle the rows or columns and the data means exactly the same thing. That structural mismatch is a big part of why "AI for tables" has lagged behind "AI for text."
Google is building a hybrid design that looks across rows and columns at once to understand relationships in the data, then compresses each row/column down to a compact summary before a final step makes the prediction efficiently, even on large datasets.
"By reframing tabular prediction as an in-context learning problem, TabFM utilizes a hybrid attention architecture and massive synthetic training data to natively capture complex feature interactions.
This approach successfully eliminates the traditional bottlenecks of manual feature engineering, hyperparameter optimization, and repetitive model training, and consistently outperforms heavily tuned, industry-standard supervised algorithms.
TabFM brings the out-of-the-box convenience of modern foundation models directly to tabular ML workflows, empowering practitioners to generate highly accurate predictions in a single forward pass."
"Finally some innovation in more of the traditional ML space." -Preston Badeer, Chief Strategy Officer at CAN
Read the full announcement on Google.
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FROM THE CAN SLACK CHANNEL
Why 'Cheaper Tokens' Isn't a Good Reason to Own Your LLMs
"Ignore the title bait, tons of useful charts and reference material and it's all from this month. This is the best write up on AI cost planning I've encountered and by a country mile, highly recommend you read it." - Preston Badeer, CSO at CAN
World-class security at half the cost
This week, Microsoft announced MAI-Cyber-1-Flash inside of MDASH, a multi-agent vulnerability identification and remediation harness. "Together they deliver world-class performance at 50% of the cost of leading models."
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EVENTS
AI Omaha Meetup: August 6th 5:30 PM at Elevator Spaces (right down the hall from our office!!)
There are two tracks available for this event.
Whether you're looking to make AI more practical for your business or you're eager to dive into the technology behind today's most advanced models, we've got you covered.
Business Track:
Getting Claude to Think Like Your Business
Presented by Patrick Davlin, DevObsessed
In this hands-on session, you'll learn how to organize and provide your company's knowledge so Claude can deliver responses that reflect your processes, voice, and expertise. Walk away with practical techniques you can begin using immediately to improve consistency, productivity, and decision-making.
Perfect for business owners, marketing teams, operations leaders, and anyone using Claude or considering AI in their organization.
Technical Track:
The Power of DINO Embeddings: Understanding How AI Sees Images
Presented by Dr. Steve Green, Data Scientist
How does AI recognize that two images are similar—even when they're not identical?
Dr. Steve Green will introduce DINO embeddings, one of the breakthrough technologies behind modern computer vision. You'll explore how embedding models represent images, enable similarity search, and power real-world AI applications.
Perfect for developers, engineers, data scientists, and AI enthusiasts.
Agenda:
5:30 – 5:50 | Food & Networking
5:50 – 6:00 | Announcements
6:00 – 7:00 | Sessions
Free to attend.
Choose the session that fits you best and register on Meetup.
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ODSA Corner
Your Next Career Move
At the ODSA, we don’t believe in generic training or one-size-fits-all degrees. We were built by practicing data scientists who needed more data scientists—so we train people the way we wish we’d been trained. That means real-world skills, taught by professionals who use them every day, in a format designed for working adults...
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FINAL THOUGHTS
Brought home the gold!
Did you know the AAU Junior Olympic Games are hosted in Des Moines about every four years?
My wife and I spent the day there yesterday cheering on our daughter. She performed two group routines, and brought home two gold medals!! They're pretty cool and really heavy!
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Dream Big, Data Bigger,
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NATE WATSON
CEO, Contemporary Analysis
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