AI Tinkerers - Toronto - May 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

🎤 Talks

We are actively looking for presenters! A presentation/demo is limited to 5 minutes in length and demonstrates a work in progress. We’ll select 4 to 6 of the most interesting topics to present. No pitches! We want to see your messy WIP! Note, as capacity to the event is limited, we’ll be prioritizing those that can demo something.

Submission Deadline: May 21st. Notification of acceptance/rejection on or before May 25th. Event May 30th. We move at the speed of AI :-)

👉 Fill out the speaker submission form here.

Presentations going down at April’s Toronto AI Tinkerers Event

🕕 Event Schedule:

4:58 Doors open
5:15 Welcome & Orientation
5:30 Talks x3
6:10 Break & Food
6:48:23 Talks x3 & final thank yous
7:30 Networking & cold food
8:00 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.

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 Shopify and Shopify Ventures. Making Commerce Better for Everyone. Shopify is supporting the next generation of entrepreneurs, the world’s biggest brands, and everyone in between.

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 it’s 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.

PLEASE RSVP AT THE TOP OF THE PAGE ☝️ - space is limited.