Optimizing Search & Data Processing with Self-hosted SLMs

Hosted by Daniel Svonava, Trey Grainger, and Doug Turnbull

Fri, Feb 27, 2026

4:00 PM UTC (1 hour)

Virtual (Zoom)

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AI-Powered Search: Modern Retrieval for Humans & Agents
Trey Grainger and Doug Turnbull
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What you'll learn

Search & Data Processing with Small Language Models

See what tasks are ideal for switching from LLMs to SLMs with the same or better quality.

Architecting an inference engine

Lessons from wrapping SGLang, vLLM, TensorRT and why we chose to rewrite most of the OSS model code.

Support 100s of task-specific models

How to support 35+ model architectures without going crazy and how to run LoRAs in production.

1 million tokens per second in an OSS K8s cluster

Design an auto-scaled multi-model multi-modal cluster to drive all GenAI projects in your business.

Why this topic matters

In this Lightning Lesson, Daniel will share a preview of Superlinked Inference Engine - an open source software for self-hosting Small Language Models in your own cloud. Cut 95%+ of your managed LLM API cost, gain access to a wide catalog of esoteric and fine-tunable SOTA models, and regain security and control by self-hosting.

You'll learn from

Daniel Svonava

CEO at Superlinked

Daniel Svonava and his team at Superlinked have been focused on AI-powered search and data processing systems since 2021, running 1TB+ vector search indexes in e-commerce and enterprise search. In 2026 they are gearing up for a launch of their most ambitious project yet - a fully open source inference engine & cluster software, aiming to democratize the access to less well known but sorely needed models from multi-vector vision capable search models to relationship-extracting SLMs.

Trey Grainger

Founder at Searchkernel, Author "AI-Powered Search".

Trey is lead author of the book AI-Powered Search and is the founder of Searchkernel, a software company building the next generation of AI-powered search. He is an advisor to several startups and adjunct professor of computer science at Furman University. He previously served as CTO of Presearch, a decentralized web search engine, and as chief algorithms officer and SVP of engineering at Lucidworks, an search company whose search technology powers hundreds of the world’s leading organizations. Trey in an instructor for the AI-Powered Search course on Maven.

Doug Turnbull

Principal Search Consultant

In 2012, Doug got bit by the search bug and he's still trying to keep up. From full-text search, to Learning to Rank models, to search agents that generate their own code, he knows the endless landscape first hand. Yet Doug wants to deeply understand the what / how / why. He wants to help teams use these technologies practically, distinguishing hype from reality.

He’s led search at Reddit, Shopify, and Wikipedia, authored Relevant Search and AI Powered Search, and advised 100+ organizations over the years - all in pursuit of the same question: how does search actually work?

Previously at

Superlinked
Google
Reddit
Searchkernel
Shopify.com

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