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AI Tinkerers Chicago December Meetup ft Turing
๐ฅ December 9, 2025, 5:30 PM โ 7:30 PM ๐ฅ
Sponsored by Turing
Turing enables companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, NVIDIA, Meta, and Microsoft to measure and improve their foundation model capabilities in areas like reasoning, coding, function calling, multimodality, frontier STEM knowledge, factuality, and safety. By leveraging a global talent pool of over 3 million rigorously vetted software developers, data scientists, and knowledge workers from 100+ countries, Turing delivers expert human data for Evals, SFT, RLHF, and DPOโand helps enterprises deploy proprietary intelligence through secure, scalable AI systems that deliver measurable results. Founded in 2018, Turing achieved unicorn status in 2021.
What to expect
This is a hands-on, demo-focused gathering for builders actively shipping AI systems. Expect live, working code and practical techniques you can fold into your own projects. Demos are five minutes each, with a focus on real implementations rather than marketing pitches. Visuals should be large and readable, and there will be no prerecorded videos.
- Live demos over slides: show your build, not a deck.
- Prepare a concise narrative: what you built, what you learned, and what others can reuse.
- Talk proposals: weโre accepting speaker proposals for short demos. Submit your talk proposal here: https://chicago.aitinkerers.org/meetup/mu_kA3-N8nNTlY/speaking
- Screening question: What is your experience with AI/ML tinkering and what challenges in AI tooling or deployment are you currently tackling?
- Attendee screening: the room is curated for active builders; you should be able to demonstrate ongoing work (GitHub, live demos, or technical write-ups).
We encourage submissions that showcase concrete patterns, architectures, or workflows that attendees can replicate. If youโre preparing a talk, reference the speaker guidelines in the linked proposal form.
Schedule and logistics
- Date: December 9, 2025
- Time: 5:30 PM โ 7:30 PM
- Location details: provided to accepted attendees only
๐ AI Tinkerers Chicago Stats
๐ AI Tinkerers Chicago Stats
- Attendees: This exclusive community of 2,198 AI professionals features a highly technical membership, with 80% specializing in Python-driven machine learning, 65% in generative AI and LLM orchestration, and 40% in cloud infrastructure. Notably, over 30% of members are active startup founders or CTOs, bridging academic excellence from UChicago and Northwestern with enterprise execution at firms like Google and Stripe.
- Companies Represented: Featuring tech giants like Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Apple, alongside prominent platforms like DoorDash, TikTok, Waymo, and Robinhood, and innovative startups such as ElevenLabs, Pinecone, Hume AI, and HumanLayer, and more
- Demos: 184 demos have been submitted and 107 have been presented, with especially engaging coverage of agentic and multi-agent architectures, reliable structured generation/tool calling, and multiple flavors of retrieval-augmented generation (including graph and dynamic filtering approaches). Attendees also explored workflow automation pipelines, evaluation/observability for agents, and performance/cost optimization for real-world deployments, plus multimodal generation and structured data extraction.
- Testimonials: