AI Tinkerers - Toronto - April 2025 Meetup at Shopify is live!

Come join us for a showcase of awesome AI demos at Shopify Toronto! Meet fellow AI/ML builders, and submit a demo! As usual, the meetup series is produced by the Human Feedback Foundation. We’re also looking for mentors and sponsors (more info below!) - both great ways to get more involved with the community.

🎤 Demos

We are actively looking for presenters! A demo is limited to 6 minutes in length and demonstrates a work in progress. We’ll select 6 of the most interesting topics to present. No pitches! Very few slides! We want to see your messy WIP, with running code!

We’re looking for demos of both AI tools that people are building, and clever/fun/hacky uses of AI. Our best demos tend to be those which show off personal projects, and we have a rule against “pitches” or any kind of corporate feel - this isn’t about your business; this is about the technology of AI and the personal empowerment it can provide.

Got something quirky to share? Submission Deadline: April 14th. Notification of acceptance/rejection on or before April 17th. Event April 24th. We move at the speed of AI :-)

👉 Fill out the speaker submission form above.

We’ve got a What makes a great Demo at AI Tinkerers FAQ page. Please read before submitting!

🚀 Call for Mentors

We’re looking for mentors! If you’re passionate about AI in production and want to support the next generation of technologists, consider joining one of our mentorship programs with U of T and Northeastern University. You’ll guide a small group of students through a well-scoped open source project over a semester—just 1–2 hours a week for 3 months. It’s a great way to grow as a leader, give back, and help universities train and graduate the next generation of AI/ML builders! The mentorship program pilot is at the core of the mission of the Human Feedback Foundation to advance a more human-centric, open future for AI. Interested? Email Eric at [email protected] or reply to this message—we’d love to hear from you!

What is AI Tinkerers?

AI Tinkerers is a meetup designed exclusively for practitioners who possess technical, machine learning, and entrepreneurial backgrounds and are actively building and working with foundation models, such as large language models (LLMs) and generative AI. If you’re deeply passionate about creating LLM-enabled applications, have hands-on experience in building such systems, and are eager to connect with like-minded individuals who share your level of commitment, then this group is the perfect fit for you. With AI Tinkerers meetups taking place in 60+ cities, we cater to a dedicated community of AI/ML builders.

Read more in the FAQ

🕕 AI Tinkerers Event Schedule:

5:00 Doors open
5:40 Welcome & Orientation
5:50 Talks x4 + Science Fair Explainer
6:40 Break & Food
7:30 Talks x3 
8:00 final thank yous
8:10 Networking & cold food
9:00 or after: GTFO

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

Presentations going down at June’s Toronto AI Tinkerers Event

AI Tinkerers Community Stats 📊

• Members: This exclusive community of 5,376 technical professionals comprises 40% machine learning and MLOps engineers, 30% full-stack AI developers, and 25% applied research scientists. Members possess deep expertise in LLMs, agentic workflows, and cloud-native infrastructure. Notably, the group includes engineering leaders from Shopify, Stripe, and Google DeepMind, alongside active open-source maintainers and doctoral researchers from the Vector Institute.
• Companies Represented: Featuring tech giants and AI leaders like Google DeepMind, Amazon, Nvidia, Microsoft, Cohere, and Ollama, alongside prominent platforms such as Shopify, Instacart, Stripe, and Autodesk, and fast-growing startups like CentML, Cerebras Systems, Modular, and more
• Demos Presented: 417 demos were submitted and 111 were presented, with recurring excitement around locally deployable and agent-driven AI workflows, grounded retrieval systems (including graph-based approaches), and reliable evaluation/evidence strategies. Technical themes have frequently covered multi-agent orchestration, RAG and structured extraction, multimodal generation (images/video/audio/3D), and production-oriented safety/security controls such as policy replay, sandboxing, and constrained tool access.

Sponsor and Host

Thank you to Shopify! Shopify powers millions of businesses worldwide. The all-in-one commerce platform to start, run, and grow a business. Making Commerce Better for Everyone. Shopify is supporting the next generation of entrepreneurs, the world’s biggest brands, and everyone in between.

🚀 Call for Sponsors! YOUR BRAND HERE: We’re looking for a sponsor to cover the pizza costs. Ping elena at humanfeedback dot io please if your company (or you personally) have funding to allocate towards this.

Our AI Tinkerers events have been supported and hosted by Google, Shopify, Cerebras Systems, Mozilla, Accenture, Weights & Biases, Drive Capital, Two Small Fish Ventures, and Shopify Ventures. We’re grateful for the support and we’ll always include your company in all the comms and make your support super visible!

TL;DR: Want to sponsor and support the community? Ping elena at humanfeedback dot io

Organizers

Hosted by the Human Feedback Foundation, a Linux Foundation AI & Data nonprofit advancing a human-centric future for AI.

Testimonials 💬