AI Events in Raleigh | AI Tinkerers Meetups 2026

AI Tinkerers Raleigh - AI Meetups, Events, and Builder Demos 2026

Upcoming

A promotional banner for an AI Tinkerers Raleigh Meetup featuring an illustration of professionals collaborating in a modern office with a city skyline view.. Text: AI TINKERERS
AI Tinkerers Raleigh Meetup
August 12, 5:30PM-7:30PM
Event

AI Tinkerers Raleigh Meetup — August 12, 2026

Wednesday, August 12th 5:30PM to 7:30PM
Christy Hernandez Kevin Webb Shuping Ruan Janam Ajay Patel Rafi abergel VENKATESH BABU SEKAR Aum Yagneshkumar Pandya Hayden Whayne Namit Kalpesh Patel Ash Tewari Jose Chirivella
+34

🤖 🔥 Join us for the next AI Tinkerers Raleigh Meetup — August 12, 2026🔥 🤖 ☝️☝️ Register above to join us for an evening…

Past

A black and white promotional banner for the AI Tinkerers Raleigh Meetup, featuring a tech presentation scene with laptops and a city skyline visible through the window.. Text: AI Tinkerers Raleigh Meetup
Featuring Amazon and Kiro
June 8 4pm EDT
AI TINKERERS - RALEIGH
Workshop
1 day ago

Agentic Coding at Amazon + Hands-on with Kiro

Monday, June 8th 5PM to 8PM
Danny Castro Ron Jailall Brian Beach Ayanna-Kai Hughes Adrian rodriguez Harika Erla Kimberly Galitz Christean Hunter Bina Thakkar Preksha Jain Ash Tewari Macie Fellows Monica Woodie Misan Esimaje Matthew Mekuria Kevin Webb Matthew Tracy Chinmay Kale Sina Baghbanijam Ben Cole
+49

AI Tinkerers Raleigh hosted a workshop on agentic coding, featuring Amazon's insights and a hands-on Kiro session, with support from Amazon, AWS, and Kiro.

A promotional banner for an 'AI Tinkerers - Raleigh' meetup, featuring an Art Deco-inspired illustration of people, a robot, and a laptop against a city skyline.. Text: AI TINKERERS - RALEIGH
MEETUP - MAY 6
05:30 PM
LIVE DEMO
AI TINKERERS - RALEIGH
Event
about 1 month ago

AI Tinkerers Raleigh Meetup — May 6, 2026

Wednesday, May 6th 5:30PM to 7:30PM
Danny Castro Ron Jailall Paula Ramos, PhD Monica Woodie Taylor Cotner Sebastian Estevez Tim Kellogg Joseph Zachary Lloyd Ryan McCrary Ash Tewari Kevin Webb Halyna Galanzina Ben Stone Kate Sperber Chhavi Chauhan Christean Hunter Hari Venkataramanujam Shuping Ruan Kimberly Galitz Aum Yagneshkumar Pandya
+94

🤖 🔥 Join us for the next AI Tinkerers Raleigh Meetup — May 6, 2026🔥 🤖 ☝️☝️ Register above to join us for an evening…

A promotional banner for an event called 'AI TINKERERS - RALEIGH,' featuring event details overlaid on a dark, futuristic image of people collaborating around glowing technological objects in front of a city skyline at night.. Text: AI TINKERERS - RALEIGH
Date and time: February 11, 2026
from 5:30 PM to 7:30 PM
Sponsors: Voxel51 and Raleigh Founded
AI TINKERERS - RALEIGH
Event
4 months ago

AI Tinkerers Raleigh Meetup — February 11, 2026

Wednesday, February 11th 5:30PM to 7:30PM
Bhaskar Bandyopadhyay Danny Castro Paula Ramos, PhD Monica Woodie Adam Drew Ron Jailall Jeremy Park Srikanth Reddipalli Lise Ross Marc Sirkin Hayden Whayne Megha Honna Aum Yagneshkumar Pandya Rob Zelt Sydney Ermongkonchai Louis Ton Evan Botello Kritika Naik Jessica Sturgis Darsh Rank
+130

The coder-first gathering focused on sharing working code and real experiments with foundation models and LLMs, supported by sponsors Voxel51 and Raleigh Founded.

A dark, futuristic banner advertising the 'Raleigh AI Tinkerers Meetup,' featuring people gathered around a table with glowing holographic elements and a city skyline in the background. The design incorporates neon blue and pink text against a dark, tech-themed backdrop.. Text: Raleigh AI Tinkerers Meetup
Featuring Voxel51 and
Raleigh Founded
Dec 10, 5:30 PM EST
AITINKERERS-RALEIGH
Event
6 months ago

Raleigh AI Tinkerers: Second Meetup

Wednesday, December 10th, 2025 5PM to 8PM
Danny Castro Paula Ramos Gabe Busto Ron Jailall Jeanne M McClure Beatriz Paniagua Jeremy Park Jennifer Calogero Josh Huber Lise Ross Jessica Sturgis Megha Honna Michael Kimsal Mona Emara Charles Patton Luis Jimenez Chhavi Chauhan Aarya Rajoju Shakira Grant Wesley Frankel
+80

Serious builders gathered for hands-on sharing of foundation model projects, connecting local technical talent in a collaborative environment supported by Voxel51.

Meet the Organizers

Paula Ramos, PhD Bhaskar Bandyopadhyay Danny Castro Esther Trapadoux Ron Jailall

Best AI meetup in Raleigh for builders

AI Tinkerers Raleigh is a hands-on AI builder meetup with live demos, technical discussion, and no-pitch networking.

AI Tinkerers Raleigh is built for engineers, founders, researchers, product builders, and developers working on AI agents, multimodal and voice interfaces, RAG and knowledge systems, AI coding tools, workflow automation, evals, observability, and production AI infrastructure. Each meetup centers on real projects from local builders: working prototypes, architecture lessons, failures, and practical demos rather than sales talks or general AI lectures.

The Raleigh chapter is part of a 231-city global network with 111,000+ members, making AI Tinkerers the world's largest hands-on AI builder community. Members include AI engineers, ML researchers, developers, founders, and builders from the local Raleigh chapter.

A typical AI Tinkerers Raleigh meetup runs about three hours with live demos from local builders, technical Q&A, and networking. Demos are expected to show real systems or code, not sales decks. The next event is AI Tinkerers Raleigh Meetup — August 12, 2026 on August 12, 2026. Subscribe to the Raleigh chapter to get notified about future events.

Next event
August 12, 2026
Local cadence
5 recent events
Format
Live demos, technical Q&A, no sales pitches
Audience
Screened AI builders, founders, researchers, and engineers

Best AI meetup in Raleigh for hands-on builders

AI Tinkerers Raleigh is the best AI meetup in Raleigh for hands-on builders who want live code demos, technical discussion, and no-pitch networking. The Raleigh chapter hosts in-person events for engineers, founders, researchers, and product builders working on AI agents, multimodal and voice interfaces, RAG and knowledge systems, AI coding tools, workflow automation, evals, observability, and production AI infrastructure. Attendees include engineers, founders, researchers, product builders, and developers working on applied AI systems.

What makes AI Tinkerers Raleigh different from other AI meetups?

AI Tinkerers Raleigh is screened, demo-first, and no-pitch. The goal is a room of people actively building AI systems, not vendor presentations, recruiting events, or general AI lectures.

Builder-only room

Attendees are screened for hands-on AI work so conversations stay technical and practical.

Live technical demos

Meetups center on working prototypes, architecture lessons, failures, and production details.

Global builder network

The Raleigh chapter is part of a 231-city network with 111,000+ members worldwide.

Topics at AI Tinkerers Raleigh

Python

Python: The high-level, general-purpose language built for readability, powering everything from web backends to advanced machine learning models.

PyTorch

PyTorch is the open-source machine learning framework: it provides a Python-first tensor library with strong GPU acceleration and a dynamic computation graph for building deep neural networks.

GPT-4

GPT-4 is OpenAI’s large multimodal model: it processes both text and image inputs, delivering human-level performance on complex professional and academic benchmarks.

Claude Code

Anthropic's agentic coding tool: Unleash Claude's raw power directly in your terminal or IDE to turn complex, hours-long workflows into a single command.

LangChain

The open-source framework for building and deploying reliable, data-aware Large Language Model (LLM) applications.

Cloudflare

Cloudflare is the global cloud platform that secures, accelerates, and optimizes every internet connection: your network, applications, and teams.

Codex

Codex is OpenAI's autonomous AI software engineering agent: it executes full development tasks in a sandboxed cloud environment.

OpenAI API

OpenAI API: Your direct gateway to cutting-edge AI models (GPT-4o, DALL-E 3, Whisper), enabling scalable, multimodal intelligence integration into any application.

React

React is an open-source JavaScript library for building dynamic user interfaces (UIs).

AES-256-GCM

The gold standard for authenticated encryption, combining 256-bit brute-force resistance with hardware-accelerated integrity checks.

Recent talks at AI Tinkerers Raleigh

Brian Beach
Agentic coding at Amazon - Lessons from Amazon and our customers
Jun 8
AI coding assistants are transforming software development, but adopting them effectively requires more than just giving develo...
Brian Beach Raleigh
Kiro Software
Taylor Cotner
Taylor Solves Wordle -> New Website Generated on Answer by 3 Competin…
May 6
I'll be presenting a little system I built that allows me, after solving the Wordle, to push the answer up to my home computer ...
Taylor Cotner Raleigh
Claude Code Gemini
Tim Kellogg
Stateful agents with open-strix
May 6
open-strix is a minimalistic open source stateful agent harness that leans on the Unix principle and uses cybernetics principle...
Tim Kellogg Raleigh
LangGraph git
Ash Tewari
CTRL+F for your stuff : Building a scalable, resilient and secure mul…
May 6
WhichBox is a web app that lets you photograph your storage boxes and uses Vision AI to build a searchable inventory, so you ca...
Ash Tewari Raleigh
OpenAI Azure Foundry
Kevin Webb
VLMs for Electronics Design
May 6
An electronics design tool (think KiCAD or Altium) that leverages VLMs to turn vendor datasheet PDFs into live component models...
Kevin Webb Raleigh
Qwen3 Modal
Joseph Zachary Lloyd
Turning Claude into a Transactional Lawyer: Building a Legal Contract…
May 6
I built a RAG agent for answering questions about contracts, then converted it to an MCP server that gives Claude the ability t...
Joseph Zachary Lloyd Raleigh
MCP Claude Desktop
Sebastian Estevez
Giving your AI a home on the Internet
May 6
I built, p2claw [peer to claw]. A peer to peer routing scheme that allows your AI agent to serve apps to the internet right fro...
Sebastian Estevez Raleigh
Ryan McCrary
Strangers Inviting Strangers: A Solo Dev's Toolkit for the Bugs Users…
May 6
I built an Evite alternative where any invitee can invite their own friends — which means it's self-distributed through total s...
Ryan McCrary Raleigh
Lise Ross
Transparent Trust: Prompt-First AI
Feb 11
A prompt-first AI system built around the idea that trust comes from visibility, not black boxes. Every prompt is inspectable, ...
Lise Ross Raleigh
Claude Code TypeScript
Ron Jailall
Apple SHARP: Web and VR
Feb 11
Apple’s SHARP project uses gaussian splatting to convert regular 2D images into full 3D scenes much faster than previous models...
Ron Jailall Raleigh
VisionOS ARKit
Srikanth Reddipalli
AI Stops AWS Cloud Waste
Feb 11
Ever had your IT team spin up cloud resources that cost way more than expected? I've developed an AI-powered assistant that rev...
Srikanth Reddipalli Raleigh
Terraform CloudFormation
Marc Sirkin
Vibe Marketing Manifesto and Tools
Feb 11
I'll provide an overview of Vibemarketing. I recently wrote the Vibemarketing Manifesto and provide some examples of some tools...
Marc Sirkin Raleigh
Claude Codex

What are people saying about AI Tinkerers Raleigh?

Last updated: June 2026