AI Tinkerers Toronto - March - hosted by Mozilla! [AI Tinkerers - Toronto]

AI Tinkerers Toronto - March - hosted by Mozilla!

Mar
25
Wednesday
Wednesday, March 25th, 2026 5PM (EDT)
Address Info
Available on RSVP acceptance

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This event has already taken place.

Attendees 538+ registered
Talks include structure-aware RAG for policy, agentic code review via MCP, and local PII redaction pipelines and more. View Demos »

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Join AI Tinkerers Toronto and Mozilla for our March monthly meetup — hosted by Mozilla, for a special evening dedicated to open source AI.

The night features live tech demos from builders in Toronto’s AI/ML community, followed by an AMA with Raffi Krikorian, Mozilla’s new Chief Technology Officer. Raffi leads Mozilla’s portfolio-wide efforts to build trustworthy, open source AI — and believes deeply that the future of AI must be sovereign, developer-empowering, civic-minded, and built for the public good.

Come demo, connect, and ask hard questions about where open source AI is heading.

March is for Open Source: Calling out for open source AI builders working on community, civic tech, social good applications, and anyone interested in sovereign AI systems and open source dev experience and tooling.

🗓️ Event Details

Date: Wednesday, March 25th 2026 

Time: 5:00 PM - 9:00 PM 

Like last month, we expect a waitlist - so please make sure to RSVP early, submit demos (which increases your chances, naturally) and give us time to review all the RSVPs. We can’t wait to see what you’re all building! We’re also limited by space capacity, and so please come early – late comers may not be able to get in.

🎤 Call for Demos!!

We are actively curating the lineup for March. We want to see your messy experiments, creative hacks, and technical discoveries in action, and especially all things open source, civic tech, AI for good, and all kinds of AI for this one!! Your demo should answer: “How did you build this interesting thing?” not “Why should someone use this product?” No pitches or pitch decks.

Demos are strictly limited to 6 minutes. No pitches, no lengthy introductions, just live code, architecture diagrams, and hard-won technical lessons.

Submit Your Demo Proposal Here:

❗Deadline for Submissions: March 17th EOD

✔️ Acceptance Notification: March 20th EOD

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

🌟Sponsor Spotlight: 

Mozilla is working to put control of the internet back in the hands of the people using it. Mozilla is a global community of passionate volunteers, fellows and contributors who have been building, protecting and shaping the internet with us since 1998.

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🌟Meet and Greet with Raffi Krikorian 

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Raffi Krikorian is Mozilla’s first-ever portfolio-wide CTO and leading the effort to develop trustworthy and open source AI, ensuring Mozilla is inventing and building technology that pushes us all in the right direction. Raffi joins from Emerson Collective, where he led efforts to bring technologists into sectors like education, the environment, immigration, and economic mobility. Prior to that, he was the first CTO of the US’s Democratic National Committee; Director of Uber’s Advanced Technologies Center, where he led the development and rollout of the first passenger-carrying self-driving car fleet; and VP of Platform Engineering at Twitter, where he managed and built Twitter’s global infrastructure.

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 Demo x3
6:20 Break & Food
7:20 Demo x3
7:50 final thank yous
8:00 Networking & cold food
9:30 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.

(Photo) A photo of an audience watching a presentation in a modern office space. A speaker stands at a podium on a stage, with a large screen displaying text behind them. Text: What's wrong with Large Language Models? Large people | indoor | presentation, audience, speaker, screen | candid Note: The image is a real-life captured moment of an event, depicting people and a presentation setting.  This classifies it as a photograph.
(Photo) A photo of a presentation taking place in a modern office space with a large audience. Text: We're shopify partners / welcome2shopify #AltTinkersTO ALTINKERS TORONTO Apply Venue TORVE people | indoor | presentation, audience, modern office | candid Note: The image is a real-life capture of an event, depicting a presentation with an audience in a physical space. This makes it a photograph.Presentations going down at June’s Toronto AI Tinkerers Event

AI Tinkerers Community Stats 📊

  • Members: This exclusive community of 5,351 AI professionals comprises 83% machine learning specialists, 70% generative AI developers, and 65% full-stack engineers. Members represent elite institutions like Shopify, Cohere, and the Vector Institute. Notably, the group is distinguished by a high concentration of hands-on technical founders and researchers actively deploying multi-agent systems and scalable production-grade AI infrastructure.
  • Companies Represented: Featuring global tech giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Nvidia, alongside AI leaders Cohere, Hugging Face, Ollama, and Cerebras, e-commerce powerhouse Shopify, and rising startups like Evenup, CentML, and Retellio, and more.
  • Demos Presented: 414 demos were submitted and 111 were presented. The most exciting themes included agentic systems and orchestration, RAG and structured retrieval (including graph-based approaches), reliable evaluation and safety mechanisms, multimodal generation and media pipelines, and practical real-world automation. Technically, attendees explored fine-tuning and local deployment, scalable infrastructure, privacy/security techniques, and production-oriented data pipelines.

Organizers

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

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Testimonials 💬

“Curation of the attendees is 90% of the experience... there were interesting people who would share thoughtcrime... This was the antithesis of boredom... What's pretty notable about how Eric constructed the room: most of the people I knew in the room I know to be good people... high-relational, high-integrity people.”

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