🔥 February 17th, 2026: 5:30PM to 7:30PM 🔥

Join the AI Tinkerers Chicago chapter for our February gathering. This is a curated, technical room for active builders, engineers, and researchers to share working systems, dissect architecture, and trade hard-won lessons from the frontier of generative AI.

Tuesday February 17th

We prioritize signal over noise. If you are actively shipping LLM-powered features, building novel agentic workflows, or wrestling with inference optimization, this is the room where you accelerate your roadmap.

Huge thanks to our friends at DubClub for partnering with us on our February meetup

DubClub is a Chicago based company building the destination where expert sports bettors (“cappers”) and fans Win More Together. Their product transforms sports betting from noisy, untrustworthy chaos into a delightful, vertically integrated clubhouse.

DubClub is hiring for a number of technical roles in Chicago, including Full Stack Senior Software Engineers and Staff Software Engineers. Come meet DubClub’s Founder and CEO Lew Burik at our meetup to learn more

Space is highly limited. Attendance is strictly screened to ensure the room is filled only with fellow engineers, founders, and researchers who are actively shipping AI.

Live Demos: Architecture, Trade-offs, and What Broke

We’re accepting proposals for short, technical show-and-tell demos. Skip the slides and product pitches; focus on the implementation details. Your five-minute demo should answer one core question: “How did you build this interesting thing?”

We want to see your latest hacks, novel context engineering setups, complex agentic orchestration, or hard-won lessons from deployment.

Submit Your Demo Proposal:
Submit Your Demo Proposal

Schedule and Logistics

• Date: Tuesday, January 20, 2026
• Time: 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM
• Location: Chicago, IL (Specific venue details will be provided only to accepted attendees.)

Curation Policy

AI Tinkerers is selective by design. We screen every registration to maintain a high-trust room for candid technical work. If you are an active builder—an engineer, founder, or researcher who ships code—we encourage you to register above.

📊 AI Tinkerers Chicago Stats

• Attendees: This exclusive community of 2,189 subscribers comprises 52% AI/ML specialists and 68% full-stack engineers, with 32% holding founder or executive titles. Members represent elite institutions like UChicago, UIUC, and Google. Notable achievements include deploying production-grade agentic workflows, building open-source developer platforms, and engineering FDA-cleared medical AI, making this Chicago’s premier hub for high-signal technical collaboration.
• Companies Represented: Featuring tech giants and AI leaders like Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Waymo, alongside fast-growing platforms such as DoorDash, Robinhood, TikTok, and Pinecone, and emerging startups like ElevenLabs, HumanLayer, Autonoma AI, and pieces.app, and more
• Demos: 184 demos have been submitted and 107 have been presented. The most exciting themes have centered on agentic workflows, retrieval and knowledge-centric systems, and production-grade reliability via evals, observability, and guardrails. Technical exploration has also highlighted structured generation (function calling and schemas), efficiency/cost optimization for LLM pipelines, and practical multimodal/document processing.
• Testimonials:

  “Please continue organizing interactive AI events with industry professionals and real-world discussions about technology trends, career opportunities, and practical AI applications. ... Events like this are very helpful for students and professionals looking to grow their technical skills and better understand the future of AI and technology.”

  — QA engineer, cloud support

  “For the people that don't get to present, what if their work could be featured in some way that allows others to see a demo online or read a deck describing the work (or both)... This is such a great idea. I signed up right away. ... Your network puts you in a unique position to really make this idea scale...”

  — Founder, crypto AI

  “Such a cool concept”

  — Devrel @ web3 foundation

  “Leaders from successful startups as speakers is great. Love hearing from my tinkerers but it was clear alpha in building a business and companies actually hiring created a different vibe.”

  — Founder, GTM strategy

  “Keep up the good work. This group is a really great way to stay connected to what's happening with AI in Chicago.”

  — Founder, crypto AI

  “Please keep organizing highly technical, builder-focused AI events like this in Chicago.”

  — R&D engineer, defense tech

  “I enjoyed the breakout room like discussions from the previous Meetup hosted by Zapier. Those allowed us to easily connect and talk about experiences.”

  — Applied AI engineer