Vancouver AI Community Meetup #27

Hey friends,

This Wednesday. March 25. H.R. MacMillan Space Centre. Doors at 6, ceremony at 7. Meetup #27.

If you've been meaning to come, this is the one. Three things happening that you won't see anywhere else this month.

Lawrence Okolo leads VASI, an open-source robotics and ML research lab right here in Vancouver. While everybody else is benchmarking chatbots, Lawrence is putting large language models on wheels. He's bringing the hardware.

Mayumi Rollings from Tiny Ghost Studios has been co-running our AI Film Club contests and the community is producing genuinely stunning work. She's screening a highlight reel of the best submissions from the first three rounds and launching Round 4.

And I just got back from the National Summit on AI & Culture, where the Government of Canada put 233 people from 160 organizations in a room with both federal ministers to figure out what AI means for Canadian culture. I'm bringing the dispatch home.

Here's why that matters for this community: we showed up as a bench. Anthonia from Ethos Lab. Loc Dao from DigiBC. Philippe Pasquier from the Metacreation Lab at SFU. Jesse McKee from 221A. Eight BC organizations in total. Philippe and I caught Minister Evan Solomon & Minister Marc Miller at the exhibition and demo'd Autolume to them directly. The first tool that lets artists train their own model on their own data, on their own computer. No cloud. No scraped data. The federal Culture Minister got a hands-on look at what consent-based AI training looks like when it actually works.

And then Ana Serrano, President of OCAD University, named BC + AI Ecosystem Association from the main stage as a model grassroots-to-national AI organization. In front of both ministers and the full room. Nine months old.

None of that happens without the community that shows up every month under this dome. The 27 consecutive months of starting in ceremony. The 250+ paid members who fund the infrastructure. The people who present half-finished projects because this room is where you bring the work before it's ready. The AI Film Club members making things nobody asked them to make. The kids at Ethos Lab shipping real products. The SIG leaders running reading groups and consciousness debates and animation workshops on their own time.

This is what a self-organizing community looks like when it gives a damn about where this revolution goes and who gets to steer.

Wednesday. Be in the room.

The details: When: Wednesday, March 25, 2026. Doors 6:00 PM. Program 7:00 PM. Where: H.R. MacMillan Space Centre RSVP: https://luma.com/rubric

BC + AI Ecosystem Association is a registered nonprofit built by the people in this room. Membership is $340/year and it gets you into a professional network of builders, researchers, artists, and educators going after bigger projects together, plus discounts on workshops and trainings, access to our group chats, and the satisfaction of investing directly into BC's AI industry. Join: https://bc-ai.ca/membership/

See you under the dome.

Kris Krüg (KK)
Executive Director
BC + AI Ecosystem

Multi-modal. Multi-cultural. Radically local. Future-facing.

P.S. If you want to know what this community actually sounds like, here are the some recent videos from our YouTube channel. Start anywhere.

AI UX Design: ChatGPT Interfaces Are Already Obsolete

Allen Pike (Forestwalk Labs) maps the shift from chatbot gimmicks to context-native interfaces. The future of AI interaction isn't typing into a box. It's software that knows what you're doing and does the next obvious thing.

MCP Tips and Tricks Expert Level

A deep technical session on Model Context Protocol from our community. If you're building with MCP or want to understand why it matters, this is the one.

I Built 52 Startups in 52 Weeks with AI Coding Agents

Michael Yagudaev shut down 51 of them. This is the brutal, unfiltered truth about AI coding: more output doesn't mean better outcomes. One of the most honest talks we've hosted.

Should We Let Our Brains Connect to the Internet?

Dr. Judy Illes, Distinguished Professor at UBC and neuroethics pioneer, breaks down the revolution happening where neuroscience meets AI. How tech is already decoding consciousness, treating neurological disorders, and the ethical blind spots we're ignoring

Mind, AI & Consciousness: Full MAC Takeover Show - Feb 2026 meetup

Something Big is Happening: Kling 3, SeeDance 2 & the Orchestration Era - AI Film Club

LLM As a Black Box - Tanya Slingsby