Orateur
Description
Large language models are quickly becoming everyday tools for physicists and software developers, whether for coding help, documentation, data exploration or agentic workflows. Yet access is uneven, and most usage goes through shadow IT with commercial frontier APIs, which raises concerns about cost, data sovereignty and environmental footprint. Many research needs, however, do not require a frontier model: well-chosen open-weight models, served efficiently on shared infrastructure, cover a large share of daily use cases.
This lightning talk introduces the ILaaS Federation and its partnership with CC-IN2P3, which aims to make frugal, sovereign AI inference available to the whole research community. We explain how users obtain their API keys, which models are currently available, and how per-user compute tracking gives visibility on actual resource consumption, supporting both fair sharing and a more sober use of AI. We close with concrete use cases and a call for new partners and users.