Newsletter
Upcoming
AI Tinkerers and Anthropic will host an after-work hackathon where participants will build AI bots for a territory expansion game, concluding with a tournament.
AI Tinkerers - London will host an in-person meetup focused on hacking open source projects.
Past
AI Tinkerers - London hosted a cofounder speed dating and fireside event focused on professional services. Ground Floor, 33 Johns Mews sponsored the in-person meetup.
The AI Tinkerers hosted the UK's Shortest Hackathon, a community event focused on innovation.
AI builders competed in a hackathon to create agents forecasting company revenue, with a $10,000 prize, sponsored by Primer and OpenStocks.
AI Tinkerers hosted a cofounder speed dating breakfast focused on Vertical AI. This in-person meetup facilitated connections within the AI community.
AI Tinkerers hosted a screening of the General Magic movie.
Less than a month out, the Cerebral Valley AI Summit lands in London on June 24, with a strong lineup including Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez and Alphabet board member Martin Chavez. Founded by Eric Newcomer, it’s a one-day, invite-only, curated small-room event (a couple hundred leaders) to network and discuss—apply here: https://reg.newcomer.events/cvl2/start.
AI Tinkerers London hosted a meetup featuring a fireside chat with Winston Weinberg, CEO of Harvey, discussing AI product building and innovation, with support from Attio, Dex, and ACI.dev.
Poolside’s 2-day in-person London model research hackathon (29th May) will focus on Laguna XS.2 33B-A3B and requires improving the model itself (fine-tuning/post-training, computer use/multi-agent, RL/eval design, quantization, inference optimization). Apply via the event page; the winning team gets an NVIDIA DGX Spark™.
AI Tinkerers London hosted a meetup featuring a fireside chat with Nad Chishtie on designing AI-first products, technical demos, and networking, supported by Phoenix Court, Dex, and ACI.dev.
AI Tinkerers hosted a VIP dinner for technical leaders to discuss software factories and automated coding, sponsored by Kiro.
AI Tinkerers London hosted a meetup featuring a fireside chat with Sequoia Partner Julien Bek. The event explored future AI company building and included startup demos, supported by Dex and ACI.dev.
OpenClaw users shared diverse applications, from business automation to personal projects. Attio hosted the community event, providing pizza and a platform for practical insights.
AI Tinkerers London hosted an in-person meetup featuring an AMA with Vercel CPO Tom Occhino, showcasing AI innovation and peer insights, supported by Phoenix Court, Vercel, Dex, and ACI.dev.
Builders participated in an intense, in-person global hackathon focused on Conversational Agents, involving team collaboration and vying for prizes exceeding $200K, supported by ElevenLabs.
AI Tinkerers London and Accel hosted an exclusive session where GoCardless co-founder Matt Robinson shared founder lessons and investment insights with select AI engineers.
Builders pushed knowledge and retrieval projects at the focused one-day hackathon, competing for a £5k+ prize pool with support from sponsors including ElevenLabs and Redis.
AI Tinkerers London hosted an in-person meetup for AI builders. The event featured technical insights, live demos, and discussions on foundation and generative AI, supported by Dawn Capital, Dex, and ACI.dev.
![The image captures two men giving a presentation or talk in a modern, brightly lit room with a distinctive textured ceiling and a vibrant yellow floor. A large screen behind them displays a list of points and a prominent QR code with an 'H' in its center.. Text: HACKATHON
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AI builders met to share insights on foundation and generative models. Sponsors Phoenix Court, Vanta, and ACI.dev supported the community gathering.
AI Tinkerers London and MongoDB hosted a Demopalooza. Builders showcased eight five-minute technical demos, competing for prizes.
AI Tinkerers London hosted a fireside chat with Vercel founder Guillermo Rauch, discussing Vercel's AI SDK and voice agents, supported by key investors.
Builders focused on agents, tooling, and infrastructure participated in a one-day in-person hackathon with over £10k in prizes, supported by sponsors like ElevenLabs.
Join Prolific on Thursday 9th October in London for a drinks reception with AI leaders on why AI leaderboards miss the mark—covering underrepresentation of open-source models and misalignment with real-world ability. You’ll take part in roundtables, exchange evaluation approaches, and network—register: https://luma.com/p1k55qst?utm_source=AITinkerers.
Executives will learn how conversational AI elevates customer experience through product demos and a panel featuring leaders from Just Eat and Kraken, supported by ElevenLabs.
AI Tinkerers London hosted an in-person meetup for AI builders. Attendees shared technical insights on foundation and generative AI, with support from sponsors Ona, Samsara, ACI.dev, and Dawn Capital.
Builders joined Open Court and AI Tinkerers for a mini hackathon focused on rapid AI prototyping, featuring a fireside chat with Tom Blomfield and supported by various sponsors.
AI Tinkerers London hosted engineers building with foundation models. Talks covered monetized servers, AI personalization, agent development, video search, data pipelines, and cost management, with sponsor support.
AI Tinkerers London hosted an in-person meetup for engineers building with foundation models. Speakers discussed managing coding agents and conversational AI, with sponsorship from Intercom, ACI.dev, Briefcase, and ElevenLabs.
Join a small invite-only crowd of 200 founders and investors at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit in London on Wednesday, June 25—featuring Dara Khosrowshahi (Uber) with Alex Kendall (Wayve), and Dylan Field (Figma) plus top European AI CEOs. Apply via the AI Tinkerers network for £49 (vs £499 full price): https://ai-tinkerers.cerebralvalleysummit.com/.
Join Langflow, Twilio and TurinTech for a dev hackathon on AI agents + MCP in London, 20–21 June at Tab Centre (Shoreditch). Apply: https://lu.ma/hacking-agents-hackathon-london (space very limited). Timeline: 20 June 5pm doors, 11pm close; 21 June 3pm submissions, 5pm judging. Prizes up to £1,000; teams up to 4; solo welcome.
AI Tinkerers London hosted engineers building with foundation models, featuring talks on AI infrastructure, agent testing, LLM evaluation, and AI integration simplification. Sponsors included Dawn Capital, Incident.io, and Prolific.
AI Tinkerers London hosted an in-person meetup featuring talks on AI agent memory, AI simulation, and LLM frameworks, thanks to sponsors LocalGlobe, Portia, and Iterate.
AI Tinkerers London hosted an in-person meetup for engineers building with foundation models, featuring talks on AI agents and open-source frameworks, with support from the Department for Business and Trade.
Builders tested AI's ability to create an MVP in just over two hours. A £1,000 cash prize was sponsored by Vanta.
AI Tinkerers London met to explore foundation models. Speakers discussed agent building, generative AI applications, and frontier model evaluations, with support from Phoenix Court.
Participants engaged in a three-hour, AI-first coding sprint to build MVPs quickly, culminating in project pitches and prizes, with support from Iterate and Entrepreneur First.
AI Tinkerers, ElevenLabs, and a16z are hosting a worldwide hackathon on Feb 22–23. Apply now at https://hackathon.elevenlabs.io. Seven hackathons in San Francisco, New York, London, Warsaw, Bengaluru, Seoul, plus Online; limited spaces, with prizes from Mistral, Vercel, and Windsurf.
AI Tinkerers London hosted an in-person meetup featuring talks on adapting LLMs, SOTA on swebench, LLM-as-a-Judge, and AI for software teams, sponsored by Sagittal and Shoreditch Exchange.
Join the Prolific Winter Summit (Feb 4th): hear Cohere, Prolific, AI Safety Institute, IBM and more on accelerating AI application development. Agenda: 11:00–11:30 registration; 11:30–12:45 innovation; 12:45–1:45 networking lunch; 1:45–4:00 deep dive; 4:00–5:00 happy hour. Apply: https://lu.ma/uzlu98de.
AI Tinkerers London hosted engineers building with foundation models, featuring talks on AI development, wearables, and text-to-speech, sponsored by Phoenix Court and Prolific.
AI Tinkerers has partnered with Tessl for the free virtual conference AI Native Dev Con on November 21st. Speakers include Guy Podjarny (spec-centric development), Lize Raes (integrating AI into coding), Jason Hand (LLMs for observability), and others. Register here: https://tessl.co/4fkHop6.
Join the London Consumer AI Hackathon (9–10 Nov) by a16z + ElevenLabs with support from Synthesia, Captions, Luma, and AI Tinkerers. In-person only—remote teams can’t join. Sign up: https://dub.sh/elevenlabs-hackathon. Judges include Mati Staniszewski (ElevenLabs) and Sriram Krishnan (a16z). Prizes: demo at next AI Tinkerers event, 4x Airpod Maxs, 4x Meta Raybans, ElevenLabs merch, partner credits.
AI Tinkerers London gathered engineers building with foundation models. Talks covered financial crime, neurosymbolic AI, LLM safety, and autonomous agents, supported by Monzo, QuotientAI, and Zilliz.
The AI Tinkerers held an in-person happy hour focused on casual networking and impromptu project demonstrations. Attendees shared code and hardware in a relaxed setting.
AI Tinkerers London hosted an in-person meetup featuring five technical talks on foundation models, LLMs, and generative AI. Speakers shared insights on inference costs, observability, and AI agents.
![A presenter stands on a small stage in front of a projected screen, addressing a seated audience in what appears to be a tech-related presentation or workshop.. Text: BUILD
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[demo] Japanese TTS built on top of MetaVoice-1B
Interesting things: some models in our stack were trained on
English data, but generalised out of the box to Japanese
DEMO!
https://github.com/kotoba-tech/kotoba_speech-release
they also added training code
https://huggingface.co/spaces/kotoba.tech/Kotoba_Speech
backup](https://images.aitinkerers.org/cdn-cgi/image/width=700,fit=scale-down,format=auto,quality=68/blog_images/img-5752-jpg-4Mtx.jpg)
AI Tinkerers London hosted an in-person meetup featuring talks on foundation models, a new startup launch, and AI applications, sponsored by Monzo.
AI Tinkerers London hosted an in-person meetup for engineers building with foundation models. Speakers shared insights on large language models, prompt engineering, and AI applications.
Engineers gathered for practical insights on foundation models, featuring talks on fine-tuning large language models and generative AI applications, hosted by Monzo.
The technical gathering featured six rapid, hands-on talks on foundation models and generative AI, with support provided by Onfido and Mystic.
Best AI meetup in London for builders
AI Tinkerers London 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 London chapter is part of a 261-city global network with 132,000+ 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 London chapter.
A typical AI Tinkerers London 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 Battle Bot Tournament on September 15, 2026. Subscribe to the London chapter to get notified about future events.
AI Tinkerers London is the best AI meetup in London for hands-on builders who want live code demos, technical discussion, and no-pitch networking. The London 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.
AI Tinkerers London 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.
Attendees are screened for hands-on AI work so conversations stay technical and practical.
Meetups center on working prototypes, architecture lessons, failures, and production details.
The London chapter is part of a 261-city network with 132,000+ members worldwide.
"The event format was great, please continue organizing it. Thorough people selection made it really valuable. Q&A section with Eric was also great and inspirational"
"Great theme this time round. Loved the design focus, Nad was a fab speaker and really insightful. Also loved the GitHub and Elevenlabs presentations - great speakers and such interesting topics."
"Make sure there is a person to greet people at the reception, standing for 30 minutes, and waiting is not a good experience. Luckily, everyone was in the same boat, and we had great conversations."
"1. Choosing great speakers. 2. Thank you for catering for gluten free people. 3. Lots of Q&A. 4. Pub session at the end was nice to carry on speaking."
"Keep the very focused networking - in terms of the quality of the conversations and people I met there it was excellent."
"Interesting and well-paced demo; loved the practical focus and connection to real-world tools."
"Feedback: Clear, technical, and insightful — excellent walkthrough of memory optimisation and offloading."
"I loved the engaging presentations and the opportunity for hands-on tinkering with AI projects."
"Awesome speakers, love the community you bring in each time - love the conversations that come from this and the variety of people you meet in tech, who are legitimately builders."
"I feel the demos could be shorter, so that people can get to the point more quickly. I'd have loved to stay longer at the venue for networking."
Last updated: September 2026
