We Got Quoted $500k for a Silicon Valley AI Trip – Alternatives?

Unless you're working for a high frequency trading company, you will probably not receive over 10K USD of value from the this.

First off, visiting companies and universities - building LLM's and using them are quite different beasts. If your management team is not highly educated in the area of ML, this will mostly be useless to them, besides any "business development" discussions one might have with people who do that at OpenAI or Google.

What you are looking for is an "Applied AI" course. And still here, you'll get sold a lot of cheap bullshit for a high price. The amount of people actually good and capable of using LLM's at a high level is still quite low, but the amount of hustlers and influencers selling basic prompts and cheap ideas is large. I've seen people do this training and it basically turns out "heres this 5 popular tools, here's how to ask ChatGPT, heres a few good prompts" and thanks for the money. Beware of that, as you'll probably get peddled that by software agencies as one step in their funnel.

What you'd need, and what you can definitely get for that price tag, is a week long curated education program based on both the tech skill level of your management group and your industry. IMO, this would look quite a bit different and here's how it would ideally look:

1. Having an interview with the people included to estimate the skill level

2. Be given an insight into your workflow and a chance to observe it

3. Prepare a program dedicated to your team/industry

4. Get everyone out to a large bnb somewhere for a week

5. Have a combination of talks, QA's & "hackatons", where you will learn, build, learn again, build again, while having a chance to ask somebody real questions.

You'll get out of this with more insights and experience than a few random visits to companies, and with the building, develop an intuition for how actually it works and what you can do with it.

Is there some reason this has to be a trip to the Valley?

Depending on your teams current knowledge, it might be a waste of time to “learn from the source” if you’re just getting started on this topic.

It seems like it would be more cost effective to take your group to a business focused AI conference or to hire a faculty member from the Bay Area and have them come out to your site for one week to brief you on the current state of AI.