Vancouver AI Community Meetup: 12/16
Vancouver AI welcomes the full spectrum... builders, artists, researchers, students, public servants, founders, the AI-curious, and the beautifully confused. This is a monthly room to swap notes, demo work, and argue productively about the future.
THE FLOW
Doors at 6:00. Program starts at 7:00. Everybody out by 10:00. Come late. Leave early. Nobody keeps score.
Keep connected: Membership · Upcoming events · Community news
See you in the room. 🖤❤️✊
Kris Krüg & the Vancouver AI Community
THE SPONSORS
Big thanks to the folks helping keep the lights on, the doors open, and the community infrastructure real:
Rival Technologies: Vancouver-grown leaders in conversational research + insight communities (aka: turning “surveys” into actual conversations). Market research platform that gave us $10K+ in hackathon prizes and actual BC survey data to train our models on real problems.
Segev LLP: Lawyers who can actually talk about tech without reading from Wikipedia, active in our community since early days. They're a full-solutions business and tech law firm with out-of-the-box thinking and high-quality legal work, recognized by Chambers as a leading firm in Canada for gaming sector emerging tech (blockchain, esports, IP).
Intellomx: Simon Haworth’s crew Intellomx is an AI-powered drug discovery platform that analyzes transcriptomic, genomic, and proteomic data to save up to 90% of pre-clinical development costs (recently joined J&J Innovation JLABS). Huge thanks for backing the ecosystem from the deep science end.
Internet Archive Canada: Andrea Mills and the team at The Permanent are preserving 30+ years of the open internet while everyone else is locking knowledge behind paywalls. They provide universal access to all knowledge—web archives, digitized books, TV news, audio collections—and they're co-creating the Archive Builders Micro-Fellowship with us to train the next generation of builders on how to actually use these massive datasets for good.
TheUpgrade.ai: AI training company walking the walk on democratizing AI skills: Fortune 500 workshops, creative pro certifications, and corporate training that doesn't treat people like idiots. They help organizations and individuals harness AI to amplify creativity and accelerate learning through practical, hands-on training
Community Partners
Metacreation Lab for Creative AI: Professor Philippe Pasquier and his lab are leading research in AI-driven creative systems, generative art, and computational creativity at School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.
Creative Mornings Vancouver: 14 years building Vancouver's creative community since before "community building" was a LinkedIn buzzword, and they let us cross-pollinate networks because they get that rising tides lift all boats.
HR MacMillan Space Centre: Our venue partner who hosts us every month and doesn't kick us out when conversations run past 10 PM. They're Vancouver's gateway to innovation and space education, making science accessible to everyone from kids to cosmos-obsessed adults.
Ethos Lab: Vancouver's Black + Indigenous youth-led studio on Main St where teens ship real products. Running AI Studios + Friday Night AI Experimentation Labs (Jan–Jun 2026) for BIPOC youth (14–24), plus the Blackathon in February honouring Hogan’s Alley.
About Vancouver AI
Vancouver AI is a neural network of curious humans mapping the terrain between technology and consciousness. We bridge art galleries and research labs, corporate towers and garage workshops because the future doesn’t get built in one kind of room.
We run monthly gatherings where builders, researchers, artists, educators, founders, and students trade demos, tools, ethics, and hard questions. No gatekeeping. No outside agenda. Just a self-organizing community that gives a damn about where this revolution goes and who gets to steer.
About BC + AI
Part solarpunk R&D lab, part community potluck. BC + AI brings curious humans together to make things, ask hard questions, and have a say in where this technology takes us.
We’re a member-driven nonprofit building public-interest infrastructure for AI in British Columbia. A commons where meetups turn into working groups, prototypes turn into shared tools, and community values turn into governance. Vancouver AI was the first room. The work keeps growing through the people who show up and give a damn.
Multi-modal, multi-cultural, future-facing, and radically local.
Plug into the bigger organism
Bring the half-working thing. Somebody here might know what to do with it.
Membership helps keep this whole strange, useful organism alive. Bring a stuck project to Office Hours, find collaborators through the directory, or help start the working group you wish existed. Keep making things together between meetups.
Your dues help sustain the rooms, the connections, and the knowledge we put back into public.
Join BC + AI. Help build what happens next.
Other upcoming BC + AI events
Nov 11, 2026 18:00 (America/Vancouver): FV + AI November: Fraser Valley AI Community Meetup
Nov 12, 2026 18:30 (America/Vancouver): AI Film Club with Kevin Friel | Nov 12
Nov 19, 2026 18:30 (America/Vancouver): ED + AI #15: What It Gave Back, What It Took
See the full BC + AI calendar
More ways to take part
Find your community: Regional chapters and focused rooms across British Columbia.
Learn through a program: Responsible AI, animation, creative workflows, and local AI.
Explore what we make public: Guides, tools, reading trails, and shared knowledge.
Watch the recordings: Talks, demos, panels, and community work.
Stay in the loop
Get field notes, upcoming gatherings, program calls, and useful work from across the ecosystem.