Seattle tech veteran Joe Heitzeberg remembers seeing a random, AI-related tweet in September 2022.
“Still not enough tinkering happening, for whatever reason,” former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman wrote at the time.
“I’m tinkering!” Heitzeberg thought.
A former co-founder and president of Madrona Venture Labs, Heitzeberg co-founded and led online meat and seafood delivery startup Crowd Cow for nearly eight years. He also led Snapvine and MediaPiston before acquisitions, and he’d been interested in AI long before the current wave of hype around the technology.
The tweet provided the spark Heitzeberg needed to launch a new project, for meeting and collaborating with more people who were actively building with artificial intelligence.
A first meetup in Seattle in November 2022 attracted 12 people. A second in Austin was led by GitHub Copilot creator Alex Graveley, who came up with the name “AI Tinkerers.”
Nearly a year-and-a-half later, Heitzeberg said the idea has taken off and is going global. In a LinkedIn post last week, he said eight cities — from Seattle to Chicago to Boston to Medellin, Colombia, and elsewhere — have AI Tinkerers meetups planned over the next month.
“We are kind of the Homebrew Computer Club of AI,” Heitzeberg said, referencing the famed hobbyist group that gathered in Silicon Valley in the mid-1970s to mid-1980s and attracted the likes of Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. “It was people trying stuff. It’s that for AI, and it’s really needed and really good for innovation.”
AI Tinkerers is intended for seasoned AI professionals who are actively working on AI-powered applications and pushing the boundaries of large language models and generative AI.
‘It’s a meritocracy of creative technologists passionately exploring from the ground up — and some mindblowingly amazing things come from it.’
— Joe Heitzeberg
Nearly 8,000 members have taken part, representing companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic and countless stealthy startups. Those attendees work in such roles as AI/ML, full stack engineering, data science and more.
Of more than 650 AI tech demos submitted for consideration, 257 have have been presented at gatherings. The ideas explore themes including AI-powered gaming, healthcare and education; generative AI for creativity; AI-assisted coding; and more.
And it’s not easy to get in.
The waitlist for many AI Tinkerers meetups is often larger than the number of people given the OK to attend. The group stresses that it is for AI builders, not AI enthusiasts. And it’s not for marketers, recruiters or venture capitalists. An FAQ on the group’s website spells out why space is so limited.
“It’s not about general networking,” Heitzeberg said, adding that the meetups have attracted CTO-level attendees from tech giants on down to a University of Washington computer science student who might be hacking an AI project on the side.
AI Tinkerers is not monetized. The only money — and the only way VCs do get in — comes from sponsors who pick up the tab for a meetup venue and the food and drink.
Heitzeberg built the platform that powers AI Tinkerers, but he calls himself the man behind the curtain in a “Wizard of Oz” sense. He helped set the rules for what it’s all about and how it works, and now managers in the new cities where AI Tinkerers takes root are left to follow the format.
Heitzeberg was leading a startup called Blueprint AI last year, but the venture was short lived as it had to close due to personal family medical reasons. He’s extremely bullish on AI and optimistic about how more powerful software will ultimately make the world a better place.
AI Tinkerers is Heitzeberg’s main focus right now, and he’s found himself advising people and startups that come through the group.
“It’s a pretty amazing forum, if you’re with 120 people, all building experimental stuff or working on their stealth mode startup,” he said. “It’s a meritocracy of creative technologists passionately exploring from the ground up — and some mindblowingly amazing things come from it.”
