Vancouver AI Meetup #30
This is a monthly room to swap notes, demo work, and argue productively about the future.
Thirty months in a row.
That still sounds kind of fake to me, but here we are.
We started this thing in a room full of people trying to figure out what the hell was going on with AI. Artists, coders, founders, teachers, researchers, skeptics, people who were excited, people who were worried, people who were both.
Mostly both.
That is still the point.
You can be amazed by these tools and still be mad about how they were trained.
You can build with AI and still care about artists, water, power, kids, consent, Indigenous data sovereignty, public memory, and who gets paid.
You can be curious without joining the cult.
That’s the Vancouver AI lane. Both hands full.
This month also has a featured conversation with Rick Glumac, B.C.'s Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence and New Technologies, on what he has seen over the past year as B.C. research, companies, creative tools, and public institutions all try to figure out what responsible AI actually looks like outside the white paper.
The point is a live local conversation about what B.C. is good at, what we are still missing, and how the people actually building with these tools can help shape the next layer of the ecosystem.
We'll also hear from Anthonia Ogundele from Ethos Lab and Mayumi Rollings from Tiny Ghost Studios, bringing youth innovation, creative production, community practice, and the kind of grounded questions this room is built for.
Builders in the lobby. Community in the dome. Weird demos. Robots if they behave. Robots if they don't. People showing the stuff they are actually making, not pitching some imaginary future with a deck they made in the Uber.
The demo pit is back. Bring the half-working thing. Bring the prototype. Bring the workflow. Bring the local model. Bring the strange little tool you made because waiting for permission got boring.
The City That Keeps Showing Up
Also, yes, this is happening right in the middle of World Cup madness.
Canada plays Switzerland at noon at BC Place. By evening, the city will be full of jerseys, cops, tourists, barricades, branding, noise, money, and everyone trying to figure out who Vancouver belongs to this week.
Good question.
After the game, come to the Space Centre.
Come because cities are made by the people who keep showing up in them. Come because public space matters. Come because the future of AI should not be decided in hotel ballrooms by people who flew in yesterday.
We can cheer for Canada at noon and still ask better questions at night.
The Story So Far
January was Alexandra Samuel and Viv, Maya Bruck keeping vibe coders honest, Erica Lapadat-Janzen naming the soft violence hiding inside so-called ethics discourse.
February was MAC night, where we let the consciousness people take the wheel and asked what love, embodiment, synthetic empathy, and "real" even mean when language gets cheap.
March was Both Hands Full. AI is extractive, biased, thirsty, dangerous, powerful, useful, weird, and making a lot of us more creative than ever. All true. Then Lawrence brought robots, because of course he did.
April was ethics with teeth. Care, fairness, scams, governance, street-level wisdom, and what happens when we stop pretending productivity is the only thing worth measuring.
May was the AI commons. Internet Archive Canada. Rachel Horst's anti-slop machine. Gabriel George opening the room. Public memory. Creative systems with fingerprints. The reminder that the commons does not build itself.
Anthony Joseph & Jonny Williams
Squamish Nation
Opening Ceremony: Grounding The Room
Anthony Joseph and Jonny Williams bring the opening grounding for Meetup #30, centering local relationship and respect for where we gather before the room accelerates into demos, policy, and future-talk.
Honourable Rick Glumac
Minister of State for AI & New Technologies
Featured Talk: From Research To The Marketplace
From Research To The Marketplace: What I have witnessed over the past year as B.C.'s Minister of State for AI and New Technologies.
Rick Glumac, B.C.'s Minister of State for AI and New Technologies, brings a tech-sector and computer engineering background to government. He has worked across animation, video games, mobile apps, and public technology policy, and will speak about B.C. research moving toward market-ready companies, responsible AI, and how to grow the ecosystem without losing the plot.
Anthonia Ogundele
Ethos Lab / Blackathon
Community AI Charters, Youth Power, And The Blackathon
Anthonia Ogundele is the founder of Ethos Lab, a STEAM innovation hub serving youth in K-12 education. Her work sits at the overlap of educational technology, equity, community values, and young people becoming creators and decision-makers, not just users of tools designed somewhere else.
Kris Krüg
Executive Director, BC + AI Ecosystem Association
Thirty Months In: Both Hands Full
Kris Krüg hosts Meetup #30 as a checkpoint for what this community has learned, what it is building, and what deserves protection as the machines get louder.
Mayumi Rollings
Tiny Ghost Studios
Creative Production, AI Animation, And The New Studio Layer
Mayumi Rollings is a Tiny Ghost Studios founder and Chief Executive Officer, bringing operational finance, people-first leadership, and creative studio infrastructure into the AI animation and production conversation.
Aliza Schwartzman & Noa Titievsky
Slapd Treats
Food, Hospitality, And Community Care
Aliza Schwartzman and Noa Titievsky of Slapd Treats bring hospitality to the room. Food is not decoration here; it is part of how a community gets people talking, fed, and actually looked after.
Jackson Wu aka Shyang
Beatboxer & Communication Coach
Live Performance: The Original Sound Engine
Jackson Wu, aka Shyang, has been part of this community since the early meetups, opening rooms with a mic and the most analog instrument in the building: the human voice. Piano at five, a love of jazz and blues, a drum kit he couldn't afford, so he taught his mouth to be one instead. By day he coaches people through the fear of speaking; by night he makes a room full of AI builders remember what live, unscripted, human-generated audio actually sounds like. No model. No prompt. No latency.
Come late. Leave early. Nobody keeps score.
No aggressive pitching.
No AI worship service.
No doom panel cosplay.
No gatekeeping.
Just real people trying to keep their ethics, creativity, humour, and agency intact while the machines get louder.
If you're building, come.
If you're skeptical, come.
If you're confused, perfect.
If you've got a robot, absolutely bring the robot.
Kris Krüg & the Vancouver AI Community
The Flow
Doors at 6:00.
Program starts at 7:00.
Everybody out by 10:00.
Come late. Leave early. Nobody keeps score.
Community Partners
Big thanks to the folks helping keep the lights on, the doors open, and the community infrastructure real:
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.
H.R. MacMillan Space Centre: Our venue partner who hosts us every month and does not 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 and Friday Night AI Experimentation Labs for BIPOC youth, plus the Blackathon 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 does not 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
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 or support: bc-ai.ca/membership
Plug Into The Bigger Organism
Other upcoming events in the community live at luma.com/vancouver-ai.