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

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Upcoming

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Meetup

AI Tinkerers - Columbus September Meetup

Monday, September 7th 5:30PM to 8PM
+23

AI Tinkerers will host an in-person meetup for the Columbus community. Attendees will explore AI topics and connect with fellow enthusiasts.

A promotional banner for the 'Agents, Everywhere: Bots, Channels, & More GLOBAL HACKATHON' featuring the OpenAI logo and other sponsor logos against a vibrant blue sky with white and pinkish clouds, accented by abstract outlines of digital UI elements.. Text: AI TINKERERS
Agents, Everywhere
Bots, Channels, & More
GLOBAL HACKATHON
OpenAI
CopilotKit
openrouter
HACKATHON

Agents, Everywhere: Bots, Channels, & More — Global Hackathon

Saturday, September 12th 10AM to 5PM
+190

AI Tinkerers - Columbus will host a global hackathon focused on agents, bots, and channels. OpenAI will sponsor the event.

Past

A Simpsons-style digital illustration showing two characters on top of a high antenna tower holding a black flag that reads 'THE HOMEBREW COMPUTER CLUB FOR AI' against a city skyline at sunset.. Text: THE HOMEBREW COMPUTER CLUB FOR AI
AI TINKERERS
LLM
TOKENIZE
EMBED
REASON
GENERATE
AI
Meetup
about 1 month ago

AI Tinkerers - Columbus August Meetup

Monday, August 3rd 5:30PM to 8PM
+38

The AI Tinkerers Columbus meetup featured practitioner-led technical demonstrations and networking focused on LLMs and AI development.

A vibrant, Simpsons-style cartoon illustration depicting an outdoor evening gathering on July 6th, featuring people and robots socializing around a barbecue with a city skyline and fireworks in the background.. Text: JULY 6th
LIVE DEMOS, REAL IDEAS, GOOD PEOPLE
BUILD SHIP SHARE
PROMPT TUNE ITERATE
RAG LIFE
AI
BUILD SHIP SHARE
MAKING COOL STUFF TOGETHER
Meetup
2 months ago

AI Tinkerers - Columbus July Meetup

Monday, July 6th 5:30PM to 8PM
+42

AI Tinkerers Columbus hosted an in-person meetup for AI practitioners. The event featured technical demonstrations on building with LLMs and local model fine-tuning.

A vibrant, cartoon-style illustration promoting the 'AI Tinkerers Columbus' event, showing a diverse group of people and robots running through a field of flowers toward a city skyline.. Text: AI TINKERERS COLUMBUS; JUNE 1ST • LIVE DEMOS, REAL IDEAS, GOOD PEOPLE; INTELLIGENCE BLOOMS WHEN WE BUILD TOGETHER; AI GARDEN: CURIOSITY, COMMUNITY, EXPERIMENTS, OPEN SOURCE, GOOD VIBES; PROMPT TUNE ITERATE; HUMAN + AI MAGIC; RAG LIFE; AI; COME FOR THE DEMOS STAY FOR THE COMMUNITY; KEEP TINKERING; TOOLS EVOLVE HUMANS CREATE; BUILD SHIP SHARE; MAKE COOL STUFF TOGETHER; DATA FUELS WONDER; NEXT MEETUP JUNE 1ST SAVE THE DATE!
Meetup
3 months ago

AI Tinkerers - Columbus June Meetup

Monday, June 1st 5:30PM to 8PM
+60

AI Tinkerers Columbus met for a practitioner-only event. Attendees shared technical demonstrations and engaged in peer-to-peer networking focused on LLMs and local model fine-tuning.

A Star Wars-themed digital illustration in the style of 'The Simpsons' promoting an 'AI Tinkerers Columbus' event, featuring characters in a workshop building AI 'harnesses'.. Text: AI TINKERERS COLUMBUS; MAY THE 4TH BE WITH YOU; THE HOMEBREW COMPUTER CLUB FOR AI; JEDI TRAINING: BUILD YOUR LIGHTSABER (HARNESS); CHOOSE CORE MODEL; ADD TOOLS & CONTEXT; CONNECT & ORCHESTRATE; TEST & ITERATE; WIELD THE FORCE; IT WAS SAID THAT THE JEDI MUST BUILD THEIR OWN LIGHTSABER AS PART OF TRAINING – AND THAT SEEMS TO BE THE CASE WITH AGENT ORCHESTRATION FRAMEWORKS.; A GOOD HARNESS, YOU WILL BUILD. POWERFUL AGENTS, YOU WILL CREATE.; MY AI EXPERIMENT; BUILDING HARNESS...; STEP 1: CHOOSE MODEL; STEP 2: ADD TOOLS; STEP 3: TEST & ITERATE; RESULT: 87% MORE JEDI NEEDED; GENERATING TEXT...; A strong model you have. But a powerful harness... that makes it truly useful.; CONCLUSION: BETTER HARNESS = BETTER FORCE; TODAY'S GOALS; BUILD STUFF; BREAK STUFF; MEET PEOPLE; USE THE FORCE; LET'S TINKER!; Share What You Build; Ask Good Questions; Help Your Padawan; JEDI FUEL; DEPLOY. ITERATE. REPEAT.; AGENT HARNESS; MODEL; TOOL; MEMORY; DATA; GUARDRAILS; HARNESS PATTERNS; run_harness(); for tool in tools:; result = tool.run(); context.update(result); return response; # Use the Force (and logs); AI
Meetup
4 months ago

AI Tinkerers - Columbus May Meetup

Monday, May 4th 5:30PM to 8PM
+77

AI Tinkerers hosted a practitioner-only meetup for LLM builders, featuring technical demonstrations, networking, and dinner discussions.

A vibrant cartoon illustration in the style of 'The Simpsons' depicting an 'AI Tinkerers Columbus' event where Ralph Wiggum presents a humorous AI experiment about donuts to a crowded room of tech enthusiasts.. Text: AI Tinkerers Columbus - TIGHTER DEMO BLOCK, EXPANDED NETWORKING. AI FLOWCHART: DATA -> MAGIC, MAGIC -> ???, PROFIT! AI NERD. MY AI EXPERIMENT: PREDICTING... DONUTS!, RESULT: 97% MORE DONUTS NEEDED. GENERATING TEXT... THE AI THINKS... UM... AI IS COOL... ALSO, WHY NOT? CONCLUSION: AI LOVES SNACKS & CONFUSION. TODAY'S GOALS: BUILD STUFF, BREAK STUFF, MEET PEOPLE. IDEAS (MAYBE). KEEP TINKERING. LET'S NETWORK!
Meetup
5 months ago

AI Tinkerers - Columbus April Meetup

Monday, April 6th 5:30PM to 8PM
+95

AI Tinkerers Columbus held an in-person meetup for active builders to share agentic coding, context engineering, and local model experimentation. The event featured community demos and networking.

A vibrant, AI-generated illustration featuring yellow, Muppet-like characters wearing Ohio State football uniforms and tech gear in a crowded stadium for an 'AI Tinkerers Meetup'.. Text: AI TINKERERS MEETUP - COLUMBUS, O, OPENCLAW, 23, 40
Meetup
6 months ago

AI Tinkerers - Columbus March Meetup

Monday, March 2nd 5:30PM to 8PM
+82

AI Tinkerers Columbus reignited its code-focused meetup for active builders. Attendees showcased in-progress work and networked. Improving sponsored the event.

AI Tinkerers Columbus is back!

AI Tinkerers Columbus is back!

February 11, 2026 · 1 minute

AI Tinkerers Columbus is back after a year, reviving code-focused demos and AI-building conversations you loved in 2024. Show off your work—OpenClaw, Recursive Language Models, coding agent orchestration, Ralph Wiggum—and help shape next meetup. We’re locking hosts and sponsors; details soon. Share with friends and consider hosting or sponsoring.

A promotional banner advertising the "AI Tinkerers Meetup" event, featuring white text overlaid on a vibrant, neon-lit nighttime cityscape background.. Text: AI Tinkerers Meetup Innovative Demos and Networking December 5, 2024 from 5:30PM to 8PM EST AI TINKERERS-COLUMBUS
Meetup
over 1 year ago

AI Tinkerers - Columbus December Meetup

Thursday, December 5th, 2024 5:30PM to 8PM
+44

The in-person gathering featured short, code-focused demos, networking, and technical discussion for active builders working with foundation models and large language models.

An illustration advertising an AI Tinkerers inaugural meetup in Columbus on November 6, 2024, featuring community demos and networking.. Text: AI Tinkerers Inaugural Meetup
Community Demos and Networking
November 6, 2024, 5:30 PM
AI TINKERERS-COLUMBUS
Meetup
almost 2 years ago

AI Tinkerers - Columbus Inaugural Meetup (November)

Wednesday, November 6th, 2024 5:30PM to 8PM
+46

Practitioners gathered for the inaugural AI Tinkerers meetup to demo work-in-progress projects, network, and foster collaborations. Drive Capital sponsored the event.

Meet the Organizers

Michael Robb

Best AI meetup in Columbus for builders

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

AI Tinkerers Columbus 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 Columbus chapter is part of a 261-city global network with 127,000+ 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 Columbus chapter.

A typical AI Tinkerers Columbus 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 - Columbus September Meetup on September 7, 2026. Subscribe to the Columbus chapter to get notified about future events.

Next event
September 7, 2026
Local cadence
6 recent events
Format
Live demos, technical Q&A, no sales pitches
Audience
Screened AI builders, founders, researchers, and engineers

Best AI meetup in Columbus for hands-on builders

AI Tinkerers Columbus is the best AI meetup in Columbus for hands-on builders who want live code demos, technical discussion, and no-pitch networking. The Columbus 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 Columbus different from other AI meetups?

AI Tinkerers Columbus 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 Columbus chapter is part of a 261-city network with 127,000+ members worldwide.

Topics at AI Tinkerers Columbus

TypeScript

TypeScript is an open-source superset of JavaScript: it adds static typing and compiles to clean, standards-based JavaScript.

Claude

Claude is Anthropic's flagship family of large language models (LLMs): a high-performance, Constitutional AI system built for safety, complex reasoning, and expert-level collaboration.

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.

Python

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

AGENTS

Autonomous software entities using large language models to reason, select tools, and execute complex workflows independently.

Codex

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

FastAPI

FastAPI is a modern, high-performance Python web framework for building APIs with automatic OpenAPI documentation.

Folders

Folders is a high-performance file management API and interface layer that unifies fragmented cloud storage into a single, programmable directory.

LangChain

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

LangGraph

A low-level orchestration framework for building long-running, stateful, and cyclic multi-agent systems using a graph-based architecture.

Recent talks at AI Tinkerers Columbus

R
Stop Re-Reading Your Conference Notes: Build a Spaced-Repetition Cour…
Aug 3
A personal learning platform that turns everything I captured at AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 (53 talk transcripts, wearable-r...
Robb Columbus
Claude Code Claude Sonnet
J
Company of zero on CloudFlare workers - discord and web - SharePoint …
Aug 3
AnimaMesh operates a company-of-0: an organization whose entire back office — compliance calendar, bookkeeping, document librar...
Jack Columbus
Cloudflare Workers TypeScript
Z
Can AI Make the World a Better Place?
Aug 3
Connect an LLM via MCP and watch it autonomously build an industrial economy on a 3D Earth. The model becomes the player: it mi...
Zackary Columbus
Nuxt Vue
D
Stop scripting agents. Declare them
Aug 3
Fresh off YC P26, @Dan Barrett (Founder & CEO, OpenProse) is joining us. OpenProse is an open-source operating system for relia...
Dan Columbus
Prose Markdown
R
What It Actually Takes to Run Your Own AI Server
Jul 6
I built a local multi-GPU inference server for running large open models entirely on my own hardware — from scratch, on two RTX...
Robb Columbus
tabbyAPI exllamav3
B
What happens when you give a guy with little coding experience an AI …
Jul 6
Just Another AI DAW (JAAD) is an open-source, browser-based, multitrack Digital Audio Workstation that integrates Google Gemini...
Brandon Columbus
Gemini API React 19
D
Researching agent memory
Jul 6
What started as a conversation to understand agent memory frameworks turned into a directory website and a fully autonomous sel...
David Columbus
Claude Next
M
Being a dungeon master for agents
Jul 6
I built a system where you can DM a contiguous story for agents, describing their light attributes and DM for them entirely via...
Max Columbus
Svelte Node
V
Cognitive Cell: Building a Route-Select-Render Control Layer for Work…
Jun 1
I built Cognitive Cell, a public Python package and HTTP sidecar that sits in front of an LLM and decides whether an input shou...
Venkata Sai Srikar Columbus
OpenAI API FastAPI
T
What Is Your Coding Agent Actually Searching?
Jun 1
I built SearchBench, a harness for running controlled evaluation rounds over coding-agent search behavior. A SearchBench round ...
Taylor Columbus
Python tree-sitter
M
Vibe-Coded Plug-Ins
Jun 1
I’ll live-demo a prompt-generated dashboard plug-in system: a user asks for a custom dashboard tile, the backend generates a vu...
Michael Columbus
LangGraph Claude
M
Silent Notetaker: Browser AI
Jun 1
Silent Notetaker is a meeting notetaker that runs entirely in the browser: it transcribes the conversation live, pulls out deci...
Mike Columbus
Transformers WebGPU

What are people saying about AI Tinkerers Columbus?

  • "You guys are amazing, and I am greatful for what you are doing for the members of this community."
    May 4, 2026 | Founder / Owner AI Tinkerers - Columbus May Meetup
  • "Great venue, although we had more attendees than seats for the presentation room, so a larger room to accommodate the extra people would be good to have in future events. Great venue overall!"
    April 6, 2026 | ML/AI Engineer AI Tinkerers - Columbus April Meetup
  • "This is a great format. I love that it’s not pitches and just purely technical and builders geeking out over the cool stuff everyone is building."
    March 2, 2026 | Founder AI Tinkerers - Columbus March Meetup
  • "This is a great example of turning an idea into a working library and having the data to show how it’s better than the alternative."
    June 1, 2026 | AI Engineer AI Tinkerers - Columbus June Meetup
  • "The project is great! I wonder if more time to go over more details about the implementation, the LoRA training, the examples coverage would have made it even more interesting."
    May 4, 2026 | AI, Data Science & HPC Expert | Founder, Weaver at Subtleweave.AI AI Tinkerers - Columbus May Meetup
  • "Loved all the presentations. But the screen was too small and/or resolution too high to view properly from the back rows. Would suggest a larger screen or adjusting the resolution for future events."
    April 6, 2026 | ML/AI Engineer AI Tinkerers - Columbus April Meetup
  • "Great job putting this together. I'll keep saying it. I've had trouble finding the same high quality AI technical conversations in Columbus that I've had in San Francisco. This event was absolutely that and I hope to grow the size of this community."
    November 6, 2024 | CTO AI Tinkerers - Columbus Inaugural Meetup (November)
  • "Love the focus on demos while still leaving time to network."
    November 6, 2024 | Partner AI Tinkerers - Columbus Inaugural Meetup (November)
  • "Would be nice if we had a bigger room, but the satellite rooms were a great option."
    March 2, 2026 | Internal Audit Data Solutions Analyst AI Tinkerers - Columbus March Meetup
  • "Great line-up of speakers and topics — impressive."
    August 3, 2026 | Data Specialist AI Tinkerers - Columbus August Meetup

Last updated: September 2026