AI Summer Social - Toronto - July 2024 is now live! Join us for an evening of fun and networking, co-hosted by Toronto AI Tinkerers, Human Feedback Foundation, and Toronto Machine Learning Society!

AI Summer Social - Toronto - July 2024

You’re invited to the AI Summer Social on July 9th!

To thank you for the support in growing the AI Tinkerers meetup and community, we’ve partnered up with Toronto Machine Learning Summit to celebrate Toronto’s AI builders. Thanks to Drive Capital and Georgian for sponsoring this event.

We also wanted to thank our sponsors and supporters that made April, May, and June events possible. Thank you to Drive Capital, Two Small Fish Ventures, The Vector Institute; Shopify and Shopify Ventures; and our most recent host and sponsor, Accenture.

Grateful to Toronto Machine Learning Society and Women in AI & Robotics for being such amazing community partners.

Come join the crew for the drinks in July! We’ll be back to our regular AI Tinkerers schedule in September.

On behalf of our community partners, we’re also happy to invite you to participate in TMLS Hackathon: Building Applications with Open Source LLMs for Fun and Profit, an an all-day hackathon on July 13th, 9am-8pm.

If you’d like to join, please register here: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/tmls-hackathon-fine-tuning-open-source-llms-for-fun-and-profit-tickets-925431710157?aff=oddtdtcreator

Participants will be given the opportunity to:

• Meet others, form your team
• Choose from multiple City of Toronto Datasets
• Seek assistance from experts at Lightning AI and Georgian.
• Win prizes!
• Enjoy a full day with food and drink included. You can visit the page, and read the FAQ here: https://www.torontomachinelearning.com/hackathon/ and message [email protected] with any questions.

What is AI Tinkerers?

AI Summer Social is a meetup designed to bring together AI enthusiasts, practitioners, and curious minds for an evening of casual networking, demos, and social activities. Whether you’re a seasoned AI developer, a budding researcher, or simply fascinated by the latest advancements in artificial intelligence, this event is for you.

Who is this for?

We are not just “AI enthusiasts”, we are AI tinkerers. The essence of AI Summer Social is active collaboration around early-stage discovery and innovation, which requires a high degree of experimentation, vulnerability, openness to sharing challenges and learnings, and collaboration among individuals with a shared level of expertise. This unique environment allows us to embrace experimentation, foster an atmosphere of trust and innovation, and create world-changing solutions. 🌍

Read more in the FAQ

🎤 Demos

This is a social, so we’re not soliciting demos for this event, but please do continue to work on your projects and think of how you could demo them in front of your fellow AI Tinkerers!

If you’ve got questions, we’ve got a What makes a great Demo at AI Tinkerers FAQ page.

Presentations going down at June’s Toronto AI Tinkerers Event

More Information: If you are new to AI Tinkerers Meetup, please read the AI Tinkerers FAQ and join our Discord channel: https://discord.gg/8WsqnC6Hk3.

AI Tinkerers Community Stats 📊

• Members: The community comprises 1,172 members, with a diverse skill distribution: 33% in AI/ML, 18% in Data Science, and 16% in Full-Stack Engineering. Notable achievements include a high concentration of professionals from the technology and healthcare sectors, fostering innovation and collaboration. Members demonstrate strong entrepreneurial spirit, contributing to a vibrant startup ecosystem.
• Companies Represented: Cerebras Systems, Shopify, Google, Amazon, RBC, Autodesk, Formic AI, Loblaw Digital, Fluent.ai, MiiApps, Talewind, CodeGPT.co, and more.
• Demos Presented: 68 demos have been submitted and 26 have been presented at AI Tinkerers - Toronto's meetups. The events have explored exciting themes such as AI in education and scientific research, alongside technical areas like LLM fine-tuning and open-source integrations. Noteworthy demos include 'Q-Tools', 'All the Trainingz, No Codez', and 'Zoobot'.

Testimonials 💬

Sponsors

The event is sponsored by Drive Capital. Drive Capital is the largest venture capital firm between the coasts, with $2.2B in assets under management. They invest in world-class founders building the next generation of market-defining companies, and have started a new seed program in Toronto/Waterloo investing $500K into early stage companies.

We’re also grateful for support from: Georgian. Georgian invests in high-growth B2B software companies and builds software to help those companies scale faster. Georgian seeks to identify and accelerate leading growth-stage software companies in its main thesis areas of Applied AI, Conversational AI, Trust and Product-Led Purpose. Based in Toronto, Georgian’s team brings together investors with machine learning professionals, software entrepreneurs and experienced operators. Founded in 2008, Georgian has US$5.6B AUM, as of December 31, 2023.

AI Summer Social Toronto is organized by the Human Feedback Foundation. The future of AI is human-centred. While OpenAI, Google, etc. collects human feedback from its 100M+ users, in OSS we don’t have easy access to human input for AI. To stay competitive and evolve, we’ll need human feedback training data. We aim to curate, collect, and provide human feedback data to open source projects, educate on why human input for AI matters, and democratize research.