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

What is AI Tinkerers?

Glad you asked. This is a monthly haunt for AI practitioners, machine learning wizards, and bold entrepreneurs who dare to work with AI! This is the month of Botober, and so our AI Tinkerers Meetup takes on a darker twist for those who are not only passionate about building LLM-enabled applications but are also fearless enough to experiment with the unknown! We not that interested in spooky AI models which have feasted on huge chunks of the internet, but rather those that have sipped delicately on hand-curated artisanal datasets.

So if you’ve been summoning the powers of LLMs and other generative AI, join us to connect with fellow creators, share your haunted AI projects, and collaborate with other AI whisperers with technical backgrounds who major in the dark arts of foundation models.

Cross-Promo Interruption: Entangled Dimensions: Art in the Age of Neural Media

Our Human Feedback Foundation human Ryan Kelln is curating an awesome immersive installation of digital and neural media art:

Entangled Dimensions: Art in the Age of Neural Media
Location: Illuminarium, Distillery District, 28 Gristmill Lane
Dates: Oct 8: noon-5:00pm | Oct 9: noon-8pm
Partners: City of Toronto, TMU, Human Feedback Foundation
FREE Admission. Eventbrite Tickets

Presented by Future Makers in collaboration with the Human Feedback Foundation, Entangled Dimensions: Art in the Age of Neural Media is an immersive art exhibition which explores the intricate connections between human and non-human intelligences through digital and neural media art. We invite you to experience the work of Toronto-based artists as they navigate the ethical, social, and existential impacts of nature and technology, including AI, in the stunning setting of Illuminarium for a transformative journey into our future entanglements.

Featuring artists: Haru Ji & Graham Wakefield, Vladimir Kanic, Jane Tingley, Nava Messas Waxman, Evangeline Y Brooks, Wilfred Lee, and Ben McCarthy. Curated by Ryan Kelln.

Including three projects from TMU Masters of Digital Media graduates: Aashana Dhingra, Maykel Shehata, Ryan Allen-Hallam, Sujay Rambajue; Charis Chu, Crystal Chan, Dione Almeida, Josephine Chan; Jahnoya Cole, Lee Radovitzky, Sarah Morassutti, and Harshita Jain.

There are also other events in the same series, including:
Oct 9: The Future of Immersive and Digital Art
Oct 10: Fusing Gameplay & Healthcare
Creator in the Loop: How to be More Real with AI
Symposium evening event:
  Your 21st Century Career Trajectory: AI from interns to execs
  The Future of Entertainment
  Biskaabiiyaang: Creating a path towards healing and reconciliation

Now back to our regular AI Tinkerers programming.

Who is this for?

We are not just “AI enthusiasts,” we are AI tinkerers and experimenters. AI Tinkerers fosters an environment where fearless innovation, experimentation, and sharing challenges are celebrated. On this Halloween-themed night, we invite you to embrace the spooky unknown—push the boundaries of AI in weird, unexpected, and thrilling ways! 🌍

Read more in the FAQ

🎤 Demos

We’ve got a theme for Botober: HAUNTED AI. To make it extra haunted, we’re looking for mad scientists! Got an AI monster or spooky tech horror demo to share? Present your eerie AI creation in a 6-minute demo! We’ll select 6 of the hauntingly experimental demos so please submit your scariest works in progress and ghostly AI hacks, that’s exactly the droids we’re looking for.

We’re especially on the lookout for:

• Ghostly AI companions
• Algorithms gone wrong in spooky ways
• AI-generated horror art or stories
• And any creepy or quirky AI hacks!

Submission Deadline: Oct 22nd
 Notification of acceptance/rejection: by Oct 24th
 Event: Oct 30th—just in time for Halloween! Get ready for a spooky night of Haunted AI.

Looking for some interesting prompts for Botober? Check out the AI-Weirdness Botober Blog for some art prompts. Or don’t, we just want to see your projects!

👉 Fill out the speaker submission form here.

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
5:40 Welcome & Orientation
5:50 Demos x3
6:20 Break & Food
7:10 Demo x3
7:40 final messages & thank yous
8:00 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.

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 supported and hosted by Mozilla. Mozilla is an activist organization led by the Mozilla Foundation that makes change in the world through a variety of ventures including Mozilla Corporation, MZLA, Mozilla Ventures and Mozilla AI. How’s Mozilla different? It’s mission-driven, which means Mozilla has the freedom to make all of the decisions based on what’s best for the internet and for everyone online, not based on the demands of shareholders — they don’t actually have any of those.

We’re also supported 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.

Want to sponsor? Ping elena at humanfeedback dot io

Organizers

AI Tinkerers Toronto is organized by the Human Feedback Foundation. We’re a Linux Foundation AI & Data nonprofit on a mission to build human feedback data into open source AI, promote relevant research into open RLHF, and steer the future of AI into a more human-centric and open direction.

Join our LLM Paper Club (requires discord account) Or see events here on AI Tinkerers Paper Club! Learn from researchers at Stanford, Yale, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Cohere, and Oxford to track AI research trends that directly impact your product roadmaps. These are bi-weekly sessions and we wrap it up for the season on Dec 3d, so sign up now!