Bi-weekly GenAI Meetup at UC Santa Cruz
We are excited to invite you to the second session of the GenAI Meetup at UC Santa Cruz, which will be held on Wednesday, May 20, 2026, at 3:15 PM in E2-506.
This session will feature a student talk and demo by Akhilesh Thite, a Master’s student, on local LLMs in the PeerSky Browser.
To describe the session in the speaker’s own words:
“”” Local LLMs in PeerSky Browser: AI That Runs on Your Machine, Not in the Cloud
You have probably used ChatGPT, Claude, or Copilot. They are powerful, but every prompt you type goes to a server owned by someone else. Your ideas, your code, your research questions; all passing through a company’s cloud.
What if AI ran entirely on your own laptop? No sign up. No surveillance. No sending your data anywhere. No internet connection!
I have been building exactly that inside the PeerSky Browser. PeerSky is a local-first, peer-to-peer web browser. It lets you publish content, chat, and collaborate without any cloud servers. Now it also runs local LLMs directly on your machine. You can generate text, summarize papers, or write code completely offline. AI becomes a tool you own, not a service that owns you.
In this talk, I will show you how it works. Come if you care about AI, privacy, or just want to see a browser do something cool.“””
We are also happy to share that the meetup is now moving to a hybrid format. This session will be held in person and broadcast on Zoom. A calendar invite is attached to this email so you can add the event to your calendar directly. You can also join the session on Zoom using this link.
As always, the GenAI Meetup is intended to be a student-driven, open-ended space for learning, discussion, and community building around generative AI tools and research. Whether you are already working with these tools or just curious to learn more, you are very welcome to join us.
Please feel free to come by, meet fellow researchers and students, ask questions, and take part in the discussion while enjoying coffee and light snacks.