# James Dumay — AI Engineer Sydney 2026

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Canonical page: https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/speakers/james-dumay/
Program status: The speaker lineup and talk descriptions are public. Session days, times, rooms and the full timetable have not yet been published.

## Skippy: The Little Inference Engine That CUDA


What happens under the hood when you run a large language model? This talk explores Skippy, a custom inference engine built for Mesh on top of llama.cpp, and the engineering behind local and distributed AI inference.

We'll start with a practical primer on how inference works, then look at splitting large models across multiple computers, reusing work through KV caching, and accelerating generation with speculative decoding. Drawing on the experience of building Skippy as a standalone engine, we'll unpack the nuts and bolts, trade-offs and lessons involved in making large models run on the hardware you have.

## James Dumay

Founder, Stealth AI Startup

James Dumay is the founder of a stealth AI startup, building tools for local and distributed AI inference. He works on Mesh and Skippy, a custom inference engine based on llama.cpp, with a focus on running large models across multiple computers and making inference faster through KV caching and speculative decoding.

## Conference

- [Conference overview](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/index.md)
- [Agent guide](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/for-agents/)
- [llms.txt](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/llms.txt)