AI Tinkerers - Toronto - June 2024 Meetup is now live! Join us and Participate by sharing a kick-ass AI demo or lightning talk, mingle with fellow AI builders and researchers.

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 multiple cities, we cater to a dedicated community of practitioners.

Who is this for?

We are not just “AI enthusiasts”, we are AI tinkerers. The essence of AI Tinkerers 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

We are actively looking for presenters! A presentation/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! We want to see your messy WIP!

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: June 18th. Notification of acceptance/rejection on or before June 20th. Event June 27th. We move at the speed of AI :-)

👉 Fill out the speaker submission form here.

NEW: we’ve got a What makes a great Demo at AI Tinkerers FAQ page. Pls read before submitting!

Presentations going down at June’s Toronto AI Tinkerers Event

🕕 Event Schedule:

4:58 Doors open
5:25 Welcome & Orientation
5:40 Talks x3
6:20 Break & Food
7:00 Talks x3 & final thank yous
7:40 Networking & cold food
9:00 or sooner: GTFO

Note: building elevators go into lockdown at 6:30pm, so late arrivals are ok only before 6:30!

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

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.
  ### Testimonials 💬

Sponsors

This event is sponsored & hosted by Accenture. Accenture is a global professional services company that helps clients reinvent and grow with innovation and technology.

The event is also 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.

And a retroactive thank you to Two Small Fish Ventures for sponsoring the last meetup. Serial entrepreneurs turned investors, Two Small Fish Ventures was founded by husband and wife Allen and Eva Lau. They want to leverage their industry experience in building large scale internet companies to help other entrepreneurs build the next big thing.

AI Tinkerers 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.

Join our LLM Reading Group. Learn from researchers at Stanford, Yale, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Cohere, and Oxford to track research trends that affect product roadmaps. Last session of the season is on June 11, led by Stanford researchers: How to avoid model collapse as a result of overtraining on synthetic data.