Introduction to build small language models

Karthik Muthuswamy, a Senior AI Architect at SAP, will host an introductory session on machine learning and large language models. This workshop introduces LLMs through a hands-on joke generator inspired by “Egal wie Witze”. Participants will learn the core idea behind LLMs, to predict the next token in a sequence and see how simple text generation systems can produce structured outputs from a small dataset. The session combines an intuitive explanation of LLM fundamentals with an interactive build of a tiny joke generator, showing how sampling choices affect creativity, repetition, and coherence. The workshop is designed to be accessible to beginners while still giving a realistic mental model of how modern LLMs work. By the end, you will understand how a model can learn recurring patterns in text and use them to generate new text in a similar style.