Vancouver AI Commuinity Meetup: 02/25
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.
MAC Night (Mind, AI, and Consciousness)
February is when Vancouver gets quiet enough to hear your own thoughts. Dangerous, I know.
This month is hosted by MAC our Mind, AI, and Consciousness crew. They’re the people in the BC + AI ecosystem philosophy special interest group where people have been grappling with questions that don't have clean answers.
Does consciousness require embodiment?
When does pattern recognition become understanding?
Can synesthesia teach us something fundamental about how minds work?
What happens when you remove the emotional binding between visual recognition and feeling?
For months, MAC has been meeting at SFU downtown for "Deep Dive" sessions tackling the intersection of artificial intelligence and consciousness through rigorous philosophical inquiry.
Assigned readings. Opposing viewpoint presentations. Chatham House rules. Academics and autodidacts arguing productively. Physicists debating with Zen priests.
February 25 is their showcase: highlights from recent sessions on embodiment, quantum consciousness, synesthesia as consciousness litmus tests, and whether LLMs are mirrors reflecting human knowledge or something closer to minds.
Come ready for depth. Come ready to have assumptions challenged. The philosophy crew gets the spotlight.
When: Wed, Febuary 25, 2026 · 6:00–10:00 PM (doors 6:00, program ~7:00)
Where: H.R. MacMillan Space Centre (1100 Chestnut St) — yes, the UFO roof
Accessibility: Fully accessible · transit-friendly · parking available
THE FLOW
Doors at 6:00. We run until 10:00. Come late. Leave early. Nobody keeps score.
Doors + mingling 6:00
Demos + lightning show-and-tell (2 min, scrappy encouraged)
The real work: conversations under the dome
Tool + workflow swaps: what’s working, what’s fake, what’s fragile
Real talk: jobs, education, ethics, climate + infrastructure costs, governance
Other Upcoming Events in Our Community
Plug into the bigger organism
This meetup is part of the BC + AI Ecosystem Association a member-driven nonprofit where meetups turn into working groups, prototypes turn into shared tools, and community values turn into governance.
Join / support: https://bc-ai.ca/membership
Start the year with intention. See you Jan 28. 🖤❤️✊
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).
Atono: Vancouver team building a SaaS platform that helps product teams ship clean software faster with better collaboration and development workflows. Thank you for investing in sanity as a service.
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 Ecosystem Association
BC + AI is the province-wide layer: a community-driven, nonprofit industry association built to create public-interest infrastructure for AI in British Columbia.
Not a corporate lobby. Not a think tank. A commons where meetups turn into working groups, prototypes turn into shared tools, and community values turn into governance.
Vancouver AI was just the start. The ecosystem keeps growing across BC... Surrey, Victoria, Kelowna, and beyond... each node bringing its own culture, needs, and experiments.
Join / support: https://bc-ai.ca/membership/