AI Tinkerers LA: Code-First Meetup in Venice

Curious what other AI Tinkerers have been shipping? Come to the next AI Tinkerers LA meetup on May 19 by the beach in Venice. This is a high-trust room where active engineers, founders, and researchers share working code, architecture deep-dives, and hard-won lessons from the frontier of generative AI.

What to Expect: Real Builds. Real Constraints.

AI Tinkerers is selective by design. We filter the hype to protect builders, focusing only on signal.

• Demos > Decks: Presentations are short (~5 minutes) and must focus on implementation details, architecture, workflow graphs, and context engineering setups. No product pitches or slideware handwaving.
• Technical, Not Theoretical: Show us what broke, what trade-offs you made (e.g., MoE vs. dense models, inference speed vs. cost), and how you debugged your agentic workflows.
• A High-Trust Room: We encourage early-stage hacks, messy experiments, and novel approaches. The value is in the candid technical lesson learned, not production readiness.

Submit Your Demo Proposal

We are actively seeking builders to share their work. Priority will be given to demos showing working demos, and have some sort of take away insight that you learned along the way!

This is a technical show-and-tell for builders, by builders. We want to see your messy experiments, creative hacks, and technical discoveries in action. Your demo should answer: “How did you build this interesting thing?” not “Why should someone use this product?”

[Submit Your Demo Proposal Here]

Logistics and Curation

Space is highly selective and limited to 50 active builders to ensure a high signal-to-noise ratio. Every attendee is screened to maintain a builder-to-builder environment.

• Date: Thursday, May 19, 2026
• Time: 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
• Location: Venice, Los Angeles (specific venue address provided upon acceptance)
• Registration: Requires providing an email and links to your GitHub, LinkedIn, or Twitter profile for technical verification.

Sponsors

The Kinn is a membership network, accelerator, and collaborative workspace for conscious entrepreneurs, based in Venice, CA. They have been gracious in letting us host AI Tinkerers for the past two years. If anyone wants to come co-work during the day, please come and use the space. It is a great space to meet other AI Tinkerers and share ideas before the event kicks off.

Oxen.ai is an all-in-one platform to collaborate on datasets and fine-tune Generative AI models. Spin up a cluster of GPUs in seconds to train your own LLMs, Image Generation, or Video Generation models. It’s built on a lightning fast open source data version control system for structured and unstructured data. Oxen.ai hosts ArXiv Dives, reviewing machine learning papers, and dives deep into practical cutting edge use cases. Join the herd 🐂

Thank you to Timepoint AI for buying the egg rolls! Simulate Any Moment in Time AI-powered temporal simulations with causally coherent characters, dialog, and scenes - rendered from primary sources. https://timepointai.com/

Partnership Opportunities

We are currently seeking technical partners who want to support the LA builder community. Sponsors participate by enabling builders (credits, access, experts), not by marketing. If your brand ships technology that accelerates builders, we invite you to partner with us.

[Explore Sponsorship Opportunities]

📊 AI Tinkerers LA Stats

• Attendees: This community of 820 technical professionals is led by AI/ML specialists (31%) and full-stack engineers (12%). Core competencies include Python, Data Science, and Product Management. Notably, over 10% of members are founders or C-suite executives from firms like SpaceX and Google. This high density of builders and decision-makers facilitates rapid prototyping in agentic workflows and scalable AI infrastructure.
• Companies Represented: Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, SpaceX, Apple, Snap, OpenAI, Tesla, Anthropic, Airbnb, Netflix, Uber, and more.
• Demos: 93 demos were submitted and 83 were presented. The most exciting themes have spanned agentic tool use, RAG and memory pipelines, controllable multimodal generation, and RL/finetuning approaches for model quality. Standouts included 5/5 demos like “Thinking LLMs,” “Self-Rewarding Language Models,” and “Steering image & video diffusion with 3D controls,” plus the 4.8/5 “Arxiv rag” demo and the production-grade “transcription engine” workshop.