Full meetup recap
Vancouver AI Community Meetup: 05/27
Videos from this event
Photos from this meetup
Captured by Michelle Diamond. Click any photo to view full size — the lightbox lets you download and share.
Read the recap
The May 27 meetup now has three native News posts: the full room recap and two speaker-focused follow-ups. The full Michelle Diamond gallery remains embedded below.
Speaker focus
A Trillion Pages and a $5K Summer
Speaker focus
Tofu Isn’t Failed Meat: Rachel Horst’s Anti-Slop Machine
Event recap
The May 27 Vancouver AI Community Meetup at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre gathered builders, artists, archivists, open-source advocates, students, and community organizers around one working question: what still belongs to everybody in the AI age?
Dr. Rachel Horst brought the creative-process thread with her anti-slop machine, while Andrea Mills brought the public-memory thread from Internet Archive Canada and the AI Builders Fellowship. The room was less about hype and more about the institutions, archives, creative systems, and community habits that keep the commons alive.
Latest Luma Details
Event: Vancouver AI Community Meetup: 05/27
Date: Wednesday, May 27, 2026
Time: 6:00 PM – 10:00 PM PDT
Location: H.R. MacMillan Space Centre, 1100 Chestnut St, Vancouver, BC V6J 3J9, Canada
Vancouver AI welcomes the full spectrum… builders, artists, researchers, students, public servants, founders, the AI-curious, and the beautifully confused. This is a monthly room to swap notes, demo work, and argue productively about the future.
This month: Open Source AI. The tools that belong to everyone, built by everyone, accountable to everyone. We’re bringing together the practitioners, advocates, and builders who are keeping the internet open, the models transparent, and the knowledge free.
In a world of proprietary black boxes and corporate capture, open source is one of the few bets still running. Come find out who’s holding the line.
THE LINEUP
Preserving the Open Internet
Andrea is the Executive Director of Internet Archive Canada, 20 years in and still quietly doing some of the most important infrastructure work in the country. While everyone else is locking knowledge behind paywalls, Andrea and the team are archiving the open internet, digitizing collections, and building public AI infrastructure with datasets that actually belong to the public.
Earlier this year, Brewster Kahle and Andrea announced the BC Data Center is live and ready for scale — building data mining hubs for public AI, climate models, and large language models for small languages. This is what open source looks like at the institutional level.
Kushal is one of the originals. He was running open models and building with the OpenAI API before most people knew what an embedding was. He’s been a fixture in the Vancouver AI community from the beginning, and his YouTube channel on open source AI is one of the more honest and technically grounded things being made in this space.
The goal: a better mental model for modern AI. Less anthropomorphic. Less hype. More grounded in the actual 100-year history of efforts that got us here. The core spine: understanding is freedom, and black boxes take away our agency.
THE FLOW
Doors at 6:00. Program starts at 7:00. Everybody out by 10:00. Come late. Leave early. Nobody keeps score.
Other Upcoming Events in Our Community
Plug into the bigger organism
This meetup is part of the BC + AI Ecosystem Association a member-driven nonprofit where meetups turn into working groups, prototypes turn into shared tools, and community values turn into governance.
Join / support: https://bc-ai.ca/membership
Thanks for being part of the May 27 Vancouver AI community meetup.
Kris Krüg & the Vancouver AI Community
THE SPONSORS
Big thanks to the folks helping keep the lights on, the doors open, and the community infrastructure real:
- Rival Technologies: Vancouver-grown leaders in conversational research + insight communities (aka: turning “surveys” into actual conversations). Market research platform that gave us $10K+ in hackathon prizes and actual BC survey data to train our models on real problems.
- Intellomx: Simon Haworth’s crew Intellomx is an AI-powered drug discovery platform that analyzes transcriptomic, genomic, and proteomic data to save up to 90% of pre-clinical development costs (recently joined J&J Innovation JLABS). Huge thanks for backing the ecosystem from the deep science end.
- Internet Archive Canada: Andrea Mills and the team at The Permanent are preserving 30+ years of the open internet while everyone else is locking knowledge behind paywalls. They provide universal access to all knowledge—web archives, digitized books, TV news, audio collections—and they’re co-creating the Archive Builders Micro-Fellowship with us to train the next generation of builders on how to actually use these massive datasets for good.
Community Partners
- 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.
- HR MacMillan Space Centre: Our venue partner who hosts us every month and doesn’t 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 + Friday Night AI Experimentation Labs (Jan–Jun 2026) for BIPOC youth (14–24), plus the Blackathon in February 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 doesn’t 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 Ecosystem Association
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 / support: https://bc-ai.ca/membership/
About BC + AI Ecosystem Association
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.
Join / support: https://bc-ai.ca/membership/
