18 months after LLM4S kicked off, and one year after Kannupriya Kalra and Rory Graves showed a usable version on the Scala Days Switzerland stage, LLM4S has matured into a production-ready platform. In this talk, we’ll share the journey to LLM4S 1.0, from an ambitious idea for bringing first-class generative AI capabilities to Scala and JVM to a complete platform for building production AI applications. We’ll explore what worked, what failed, what we learned from building in one of the fastest-moving areas of technology, and why Scala’s type system and functional programming foundations have proved particularly valuable in the age of LLMs and agents. Along the way, we’ll demonstrate how LLM4S has evolved to support capabilities including multi-provider LLM integration, tool calling, MCP, agent orchestration, memory, observability, streaming, speech and multimodal AI, and production deployment patterns. Expect live demos, architecture diagrams, lessons from the open-source journey, and a practical look at what it takes to move from an AI experiment to a production-ready Scala application. Whether you have followed LLM4S from the beginning or are discovering it for the first time, you’ll leave with a clear picture of what LLM4S 1.0 can do, where the ecosystem is heading, and why your next AI project can be built in Scala.
Kannupriya Kalra is the Co-Founder of the LLM4S Foundation and creator of LLM4S, an AI-native platform for Scala. She is an engineering leader based in London. She contributes to the AI and Scala open-source ecosystem through the Scala Center and Google Open Source and has led Google Summer of Code programmes for the Scala Center in 2024 and 2025. She is also collaborating with Manning Publishing in New York to create practical AI learning resources for developers. A global speaker, Kannupriya has presented on AI, Scala, and open source in more than ten countries. She is passionate about empowering developers through hands-on generative AI projects, open-source contributions, and responsible AI education. Her engineering experience includes building scalable backend systems using functional Scala at Sky in London. Rory Graves has been passionate about coding for as long as he can remember, starting with writing games in BASIC many years ago. Over a 30+ year career, he has worked across a vast range of systems, from embedded software to distributed, internet-scale bidding engines. His experience spans industries, company sizes, from two-person startups to multinational corporations, and programming paradigms. A long-time advocate of Scala, Rory has contributed to numerous open-source projects, including performance optimisations in the Scala compiler. Today, he works in a hybrid role supporting applied AI and ML research while continuing to mentor developers and share knowledge through public speaking. Outside software, Rory is a martial artist, a windmill tour guide, and a passionate mentor of programming and public speaking.
