AI Demos for Builders

The first LA AI Tinkerers meetup of the year is happening on Thursday, January 29th. 

If you’d like to showcase your work, apply for a demo slot. Your project can be anything LLM based, AI based, machine learning based, and doesn’t need to focus on video generation. It can absolutely be a rough or partially working prototype. The nerdier and more work-in-progress, the better. The goal is to get inspired and share practical tips and lessons learned with the community. We love LLMs, VLMs, agents, research papers, traditional machine learning, anything you find as an interesting workflow with the latest and greatest in AI.

Although demo slots are currently available, they are filling up rapidly.

Date: January 29th, 2026 Time: 6:00 PM (Arrival) - 6:30 PM (Demos Start) Official end time: 8:00 PM, but feel free head over to Maos to grab some more egg rolls or Chinese food after.

We’re excited to welcome a special guest: the creators of the Alibaba WAN model series. If you haven’t tried WAN yet, think SORA-style video generation - but with open-source models you can run at home or via API. The WAN team will dive deep into their models, showcasing use cases and what it takes to build state of the art video generation.

What to Expect: Real Builder. Live Demos.

AI Tinkerers is a high-trust room for candid technical work. We prioritize live demos, working code, and deep Q&A over polished slideware or product pitches.

• Demos > Decks: Presentations are short (~5 minutes) and must focus on implementation details, architecture, workflow graphs, and context engineering setups.
• Technical, Not Theoretical: Show us what broke, what trade-offs you made, and how you debugged your agentic workflows.
• Hackers Welcome: We encourage early-stage hacks, messy experiments, and even broken demos. The value is in the technical lesson learned, not production readiness.

Submit Your AI Demo Proposal

We are actively seeking builders to share their work. Priority will be given to demos showing novel approaches to video generation, multimodal orchestration, or scaling large models.

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, especially related to video generation or large models. Your demo should answer: “How did you build this interesting thing?” not “Why should someone use this product?” Broken demos are welcome.

Submit Your AI Demo Proposal Here

Note: All attendees, including speakers, are screened to ensure the room remains high-signal and builder-to-builder.

Sponsored by Alibaba WAN Team

We are grateful to the Alibaba WAN team for supporting this builder session. They will be showcasing their latest advancements in frontier video generation models, offering a deep technical dive into the architecture and trade-offs of large-scale generative systems.

Alibaba’s Wan model is a cutting-edge open-source AI video foundation model suite that turns text, images, audio, and reference video into high-quality, cinematic video content with smooth motion and realistic detail. It powers features like text-to-video, image-to-video, and character animation, supports multilingual inputs, and has been optimized to work on consumer-grade GPUs while ranking highly on generative benchmarks. Built on advanced diffusion and VAE technologies, successive Wan releases (e.g., Wan 2.1, Wan 2.2, Wan 2.6) deliver stronger temporal consistency, richer visuals, and broader creative controls, making Wan ideal for creators, developers, and brands looking to produce professional-grade AI video content.

Sponsored by Oxen.ai

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 🐂

Sponsored by Timepoint AI

Timepoint AI builds tools for synthetic time travel - and buys the egg rolls for Tinkerers LA. https://timepointai.com. If you know Sean, he is the man, and life blood of the Venice AI Tinkerers community. Always appreciate him bringing the vibes and good energy and egg rolls.

Thanks to AILA 

This event wouldn’t be possible with AILA giving us access to their space for demos.

Logistics and Registration

Date: Thursday, January 29th, 2026

Time: 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM

Location: Venice, CA (Specific address provided upon acceptance)

Curation: Attendance is limited to 150 active builders. Registration requires providing an email and links to your GitHub, LinkedIn, or Twitter profile for technical verification.

Space is highly selective by design. Apply now to secure your spot.

📊 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.
• Testimonials:

  “Great host and great balances - of info and personal interactions, of ordered schedule and flexibility for questions, food for thought and yummy food to eat.”

  — Founder, hybrid media

  “Amazing forum to learn from fellow AI enthusiasts and see how they are bringing their visions to life - great demo showcase and very welcoming community”

  — Principal GTM consultant

  “Tie between interesting, well-timed presentations and great networking.”

  — Founder, hybrid media

  “...a truly valuable experience to find an in-person event + community to meet and learn from others navigating the same challenges and spaces.”

  — Principal GTM consultant

  “Love the passion, man. Keep it up! I'm building something sorta like this and would love to chat....”

  — Senior engineer, edtech

  “In the future, please have at least 2 week's notice for announcing a meetup!”

  — AI startup founder

  “Excellent time keeping and sensing mood of the room on questions. That is when to allow space for questions, and when to wrap them up.”

  — Lead Analyst, government