AI Events in Fort Wayne | AI Tinkerers Meetups 2026

AI Tinkerers Fort Wayne - AI Meetups, Events, and Builder Demos 2026

A banner announcing an AI Tinkerers meetup in Fort Wayne on July 16, 2024.. Text: AI Tinkerers
Fort Wayne
7/16/2024 Meetup
It's Time To Get To Work
Meetup
almost 2 years ago

"AI Fort Wayne July Meetup: Embrace the Future of AI Together at Swizzle Market!"

Tuesday, July 16th, 2024 6:30PM to 9PM
Jon Fazzaro Jennifer Hunter Steve Franks Paul Pennell Jason Barnes

Attendees gathered for an in-person AI meetup focused on sharing hands-on work, trading lessons, and troubleshooting real problems in a peer review setting at Swizzle Market.

A photo of a lively bar or restaurant scene with people seated at tables, enjoying drinks and live music.
Meetup
almost 2 years ago

Fort Wayne AI Tinkerers: June Meetup

Thursday, June 13th, 2024 7PM
Kai Blakeborough Angie Carel Steve Franks Lindsay Lott Miesha Severinov Chuck Knox Christer Watson Charmaine Quinn Philip Gerken Paul Pennell JOSHUA DINGUS

The AI Tinkerers gathered to reconnect, share progress on projects, and plan concrete next steps for the growing Fort Wayne AI community.

An illustration of a bustling indoor market scene with people eating, working on computers, and browsing goods.
Meetup
about 2 years ago

FW AI Tinkerers: April Meetup (New Location!)

Thursday, April 25th, 2024 5:30PM to 7:30PM
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The AI Tinkerers gathered for an in-person meetup featuring peer-driven connection for builders utilizing LLMs and generative AI through short, work-in-progress demos.

An illustration of a person with headphones working on a computer in a dimly lit room with neon accents.
Meetup
about 2 years ago

Fort Wayne AI Tinkerers: March Meetup

Thursday, March 28th, 2024 5:30PM to 7:30PM
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The practitioner-focused group met for hands-on connection among builders experimenting with foundation models and large language models.

A woman wearing futuristic glasses works at a computer in a neon-lit room, with a wireframe head displayed on the screen.. Text: AI
Meetup
over 2 years ago

Fort Wayne AI Tinkerers: February Meetup

Thursday, February 29th, 2024 5:30PM to 7:30PM
Kai Blakeborough Eli T. Drumm Angie Carel William Thompson Chuck Knox Heather Burgette Daniel Reese Richie Singh Doug Wallstrom Cory Sunday David Liu Chris Lomont Paul Pennell Daniel H Swartz

The practitioner-focused meetup brought together builders experimenting with large language models and generative artificial intelligence for honest, collaborative work.

Fort Wayne AI Tinkerers: The Inaugural Meetup
Meetup
over 2 years ago

Fort Wayne AI Tinkerers: The Inaugural Meetup

Thursday, January 25th, 2024 5:30PM to 7:30PM
Kai Blakeborough Chuck Knox Cory Sunday Doug Wallstrom Angie Carel Yashi Yadav Joshua Dingus McClain Shewman Adam Lobdell Sherif Elfayoumy Chris Lomont Stephen Heindel Tarek Traore Rick Crow Manan Ayde Paul Pennell Richie Singh Jesse L. Crammer
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The inaugural practitioner-focused meetup gathered builders working on foundation models for candid collaboration, experimentation, and sharing early-stage discoveries.

Meet the Organizers

Chuck Knox Nathan Sawmiller

Best AI meetup in Fort Wayne for builders

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

AI Tinkerers Fort Wayne 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 Fort Wayne chapter is part of a 231-city global network with 110,000+ 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 Fort Wayne chapter.

A typical AI Tinkerers Fort Wayne 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. Check the upcoming events listed above for the next scheduled meetup. Most AI Tinkerers chapters run monthly, but frequency varies by city. Subscribe to the Fort Wayne chapter to get notified.

Local cadence
4 recent events
Format
Live demos, technical Q&A, no sales pitches
Audience
Screened AI builders, founders, researchers, and engineers

Best AI meetup in Fort Wayne for hands-on builders

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

AI Tinkerers Fort Wayne 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 Fort Wayne chapter is part of a 231-city network with 110,000+ members worldwide.

Topics at AI Tinkerers Fort Wayne

deck

Deck is a local development environment manager that uses Docker to spin up reproducible, cloud-synced workspaces in seconds.

Grok3

xAI's frontier model trained on the 100,000-GPU Colossus cluster to dominate reasoning and real-time data synthesis.

Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word is the definitive word processing application (first released in 1983) for creating, editing, and sharing professional text documents with a standard .docx file format.

Notebook LM

An AI-powered research assistant from Google that uses Gemini 1.5 Pro to ground insights in your specific documents.

PDF

Portable Document Format (PDF): The universal, fixed-layout file format ensuring document fidelity across all operating systems and devices.

PowerPoint

PowerPoint is the industry-standard presentation platform: build, collaborate on, and deliver high-impact visual narratives with Microsoft 365 integration.

text

Text technology (NLP) processes and interprets human language data, enabling applications like sentiment analysis, machine translation, and advanced content classification.

Recent talks at AI Tinkerers Fort Wayne

Chuck Knox
Notebook LM: AI Slide Decks
Feb 21
Creating a slide Deck in Power Point has always taken a large amount of time. Using Word as the basis for a talk, Grok to add d...
Chuck Knox Fort Wayne
Microsoft Word Grok3
Chuck Knox
Google Earth Engine: Downloading LiDAR
Aug 19
I will be presenting a plugin for Google Earth Engine that automatically downloads lidar data and creates a digital elevation m...
Chuck Knox Fort Wayne
Google Earth Engine Claude
Nate A Ross
OpenAI Real-Time Voice Agents
Aug 19
Live coding demonstration showing how to build real-time voice conversations with AI using LiveKit's WebRTC infrastructure and ...
Nate A Ross Fort Wayne
GPT-4 OpenAI Realtime API
Igor Nikitin
ChatGPT Feasibility for Financial Modeling
May 20
Is it feasible to replace current financial models used in the insurance industry with a ChatGPT style chat that takes insuranc...
Igor Nikitin Fort Wayne
ChatGPT
Chuck Knox
ML Finds Stable CO₂ Injection Sites
Apr 15
Many ethanol plants are struggling with complex subsurface conditions when evaluating sites for the injection of carbon dioxide...
Chuck Knox Fort Wayne
Google Earth Engine Sentinel-2
Chuck Knox
Lidar Processing for Machine Learning
Oct 15
Lidar is a pulsed laser scan of the surface of the Earth. Billions of points contain accurate X,Y and Z coordinates. This dense...
Chuck Knox Fort Wayne
LiDAR Point Cloud
Rob Schleinkofer
MITRE ATLAS Local LLM Security
Oct 15
Security resources will be shared and attendees will gain insights into the MITRE ATLAS™ AI security framework and explore prac...
Rob Schleinkofer Fort Wayne
LangChain Ollama
JOSHUA DINGUS
Aider: AI Pair Programming
Aug 20
Meet Aider —an open-source tool that's redefining how developers work with large codebases. Aider seamlessly integrates with Gi...
JOSHUA DINGUS Fort Wayne
GPT-4o Claude
Jon Fazzaro
Don't Generate, Renovate
Jul 16
The real cost of software engineering is not creating new code, but changing existing code. It's right there in the name—softwa...
Jon Fazzaro Fort Wayne
Eli T. Drumm
WGPT
Feb 29
The goal is to create a completely AI-generated radio station, where the metadata, album art, and music are all generated from ...
Eli T. Drumm Fort Wayne
Kai Blakeborough
SmartSummary: A CustomGPT
Feb 29
SmartSummary is a specialized version of ChatGPT designed to provide high-quality, abstract-style summaries and outlines of use...
Kai Blakeborough Fort Wayne
ChatGPT
Doug Wallstrom
Ask Wayne
Jan 25
At Interplay we created a Custom GPT to help discover all the great places to enjoy on an evening out in Fort Wayne. A night of...
Doug Wallstrom Fort Wayne
Custom GPT Google Search

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Last updated: June 2026