No Language Forgotten: Empowering Global Communities with AMD Powered AI Innovation

This webinar explores how open ecosystems and specialized AI can help close gaps in global AI access, especially for underserved languages and communities. Panelists from Omneity Labs, Featherless.ai, and AMD discuss how culturally aware, community-owned language models can better serve people whose languages and local contexts are often overlooked by mainstream AI development.

The conversation also examines how personalized models can make niche intelligence more economically viable, and how AMD’s open software and hardware stack supports broader participation by upstreaming performance improvements across the ecosystem. Panelists discuss whether AI will widen or narrow inequality, emphasizing the urgency of building diverse, community-driven AI ecosystems before a small number of models and value systems dominate.

Wesley George

Co-founder and COO - Featherless.ai

Wes studied computer science and pure math at the Universities of Waterloo and Toronto before starting in venture-backed tech in Toronto. His first venture as founder, Proof, founded in 2017 was acquired in 2021. As a father of two, Wes is interested in technology that empowers individuals and communities, promotes justice, and enables social mobility.

Omar Kamali

Senior Director of GenAI Engineering - Blue Yonder

Omar leads the training of specialized LLMs for the supply chain industry. He is also the founder of Omneity Labs, an AI research lab focused on training models for low-resource languages, including Sawalni (“Ask Me”), the first LLM built for Moroccan languages such as Darija and Amazigh. Across both roles, his work centers on building purpose-built language models that perform in the real world while giving more communities the tools to shape GenAI in their own domains, cultures, and languages.

Markus Hartikainen

Senior Manager, Software Development - AMD

Markus leads engineering teams focused on AI inference performance and production readiness on AMD Instinct™ GPUs. He drives customer-driven roadmap work in vLLM, upstreaming production learnings into features such as speculative decoding and attention optimizations. Markus holds a PhD in computer science and brings deep experience across the AI stack, from systems-level C++ and performance engineering to model deployment at scale.

Guy Currier

Research Director - The Futurum Group

Guy is responsible for positioning, go-to-market, and sales guidance across technologies and markets. He has decades of field experience describing technologies, their business and community value, and how they are evaluated and acquired. Guy’s specialty areas include AI, DevOps/cloud-native, enterprise applications, application integration, Big Data, governance-risk-compliance, containerization, virtualization, HPC, CPUs-GPUs-xPUs, and systems lifecycle management.

Guy started his technology career as a research director for technology media company Ziff Davis, with stints at PC Magazine, eWeek, and CIO Insight. Prior to joining Visible Impact, he worked at Dell, including postings in marketing, product, and technical marketing groups for a wide range of products, including engineered systems, cloud infrastructure, enterprise software, and mission-critical cloud services. He lives and works in Austin, TX.