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  • 🤖💡 NY Tech AI+ Newsletter: AI Events [4/21- 4/27] + Practical AI Insights + AI Community Updates in NYC 🧠🚀🌆

🤖💡 NY Tech AI+ Newsletter: AI Events [4/21- 4/27] + Practical AI Insights + AI Community Updates in NYC 🧠🚀🌆

Author

Frederike Falke
April 21, 2025

Welcome to NYTech AI+, your weekly newsletter featuring upcoming AI events in NYC, AI insights, community spotlights, and soon some playful yet serious AI ideas ;) Know someone who would love to join in too? Share this newsletter and let's dive in!

What we cover today

  • Upcoming AI Events in town

  • AI + Coding for Non-Coders: 3 Tips to Get Started

  • AI Innovation Insights: Inside the mind of Claude

  • Community Updates

  • BONUS: Join my upcoming AI + Coding for Non-Coders session next Friday at 12pm!

📅 Upcoming AI Events in Town

Next Week:

  • Tue, 22nd Apr - "Identity in the Age of AI" Panel - What happens to our identity and potential identity fraud when human and agentic identities blend increasingly with AI? If that is a question you are interested in, then join this panel discussion to get new insights and perspectives (morning event)

  • Tue, 22nd Apr - NYC local & open source AI developer meetup - Join for Cline and LM Studios first developer AI meetup in town with live demos and Q&A

  • Wed, 23rd Apr - Attention in the Age of AI with Gary Vaynerchuk - Do you need to better market yourself in the age of AI? And do you want to learn about trends and insights into industries and marketing? Then join in to hear from GaryVee to learn how to stand out in the age of AI

  • Thu, 24th Apr - From Concept to Reality: Exploring Robotics with AI ⚡️ - This is for everyone building with AI on the more technical side, with a presentation in the space and networking afterwards

  • Thu, 24th Apr - ai circle happy hour - Join the AI Circle members and non-members for mix and mingling and exchanging best practices all around AI

  • Thu, 24th Apr - Decentralized AI - Join an evening of speakers from Flower AI, Temper AI and Modelex AI to discuss the intersection of blockchain and AI for decentralized AI with a panel to follow and some networking

Week After:

After That:

  • Tue, 13th May - NYC AI Users - AI Tech Talks, Demo & Social - Join New York AI Users for an evening of talks covering LLM flaws and universal translation. The event will feature technical presentations and social networking in a cool venue setup with screens and space for mingling

  • Tue, 13th May - New York AI/ML Conversations Meetup - Head to Capital One Flatiron Office for their regular AI/ML conversations meetup happening every 2nd Tuesday of the month. Their events feature technical presentations from industry experts, networking opportunities, and a great crowd of machine learning practitioners

  • Wed, 14th May - GenerationAI 2025 - New York - Hear from industry-experts at companies like Google, IBM and co on how to build AI ready infrastructure and how to architect an AI-powered future

  • Wed, 14th May - The AI Breakfast Club: Real Stories, Real Impact w/ Deel, Hubstaff & Soma Capital - AI is everywhere, but that is not only about some ChatGPT, but some deep-dives into hiring, decision-making and payrolls

  • Fri, 16th May - OOO Summit 2025 - While not exclusively AI-focused, this entrepreneurship summit brings together founders, investors, and operators with plenty of AI content woven throughout. Great for those building AI startups or implementing AI in their businesses (paid event - tickets start at $199)

  • Tue, 27th May - AI Ignite Pitch Battle - New York - Join in for 10 innovative AI startups take the stage to showcase their solutions in a pitch competition! Great event for connecting with founders, investors, and fellow AI enthusiasts while seeing new demos and listening to talks

  • Thu, 5th Jun - Generative AI Summit New York - Connect with hundreds of pioneering engineers, developers, and executives at this summit featuring speakers from Google DeepMind, Hugging Face, Sony, and more AI industry leaders ($495+)

  • Fri, 6th Jun - The AI & Finance Conference - Join AI NYC for a comprehensive conference on AI in finance featuring lectures, panels, and networking opportunities with industry leaders. Last year's event included speakers from major companies like NVIDIA, Blackrock, Google, IBM, and Microsoft

  • June 2nd - June 8th 2025 - New York Tech Week - Mark your calendars for New York Tech Week featuring numerous AI-focused events and opportunities to connect with the tech community. Great time to secure your spot early for what promises to be a week full of innovation and networking

💡 AI + Coding for Non-Coders: 3 Tips to Get Started

Last Friday I hosted our first AI + Coding for Non-Coders session and wow, what a blast we had! For those who couldn't join, here are 3 quick tips I shared on how to build your own digital products without writing a single line of code yourself:

Tip #1: Use Lovable for super-quick website creation 

Want a landing page for your event or product in literally 5 minutes? Here's my formula:

  • Let Claude for Business (or similar) write you a short prompt for a landing page including a link button to an events page (i.e., at lu.ma)

  • Paste this prompt into Lovable (costs $20 per month, but totally worth it!)

  • Make it beautiful by adding some colors and tweaking the design

  • Hit publish, connect your own domain, and voilà - you're done!

We did this live and had a complete event landing page ready in under 10 minutes. No code, no design skills needed!

Tip #2: Explore Cursor for more complex programming tasks 

If you're diving into more business logic or backend development, Cursor (+ Claude Code) is your best new friend. Unlike Lovable which is more design-focused, Cursor helps you:

  • Work directly with code (even if you don't understand it fully ;))

  • Build more complex functionality

  • Saves you significant time on development tasks

Tip #3: Build your own AI tools when commercial solutions hit paywalls fast 

Many "free" transcription services hit their limits quickly and that can be really annoying soon. Especially pricy if you need a tool for each process. Instead, you can use AI to help you build a quick fix for yourself. The benefits:

  • Build your own audio transcription tool with zero lines of code

  • Reuse it as often as you need

  • Avoid recurring subscription fees from commercial services that limit free usage

If you found these tips helpful, don't miss our next session this Friday at 12pm via Google Meet where I'll show you how to build an audio transcription tool for yourself while writing 0 lines of code! And yes, you'll see some code during implementation, but don't worry - you won't need to write any code yourself 😉

🧠 AI Innovation Insights

Research Spotlight: Understanding the Internal Biology of Large Language Models

An interesting and rather groundbreaking paper from Anthropic reveals fascinating insights into the inner workings of Claude 3.5 Haiku through a novel, so-called "circuit tracing" methodology. Published in two complementary papers, "Circuit Tracing: Revealing Computational Graphs in Language Models" and "On the Biology of a Large Language Model", the research shows that:

  • LLMs perform sophisticated multi-step reasoning "in their head" before producing outputs - for example, when solving a math problem, Claude activates specific circuits that perform calculations before generating the answer text

  • Models engage in both forward planning (considering future possibilities) and backward planning (working from goals) - like when writing poetry, Claude activates features representing rhyming words at the beginning of a line, structuring the sentence to arrive at that conclusion naturally

  • Evidence of primitive "metacognitive" circuits that allow models to assess their own knowledge - the research found a default "refusal" circuit that activates unless concepts relevant to the query are recognized by the model

  • Models use both language-specific and language-independent features when processing multilingual content - asking "What is the opposite of small?" in English, French, and Chinese activates the same language-neutral components related to conceptual opposites

  • Detailed mechanisms for handling when models hallucinate versus recognize knowledge boundaries - when the model doesn't recognize entities in a question, its default behavior is to decline answering

Key Takeaway: The research, summarized in an Anthropic blog post, shows that these AI models' internal operations are highly abstract and generalizable across contexts. While the paper uncovers only a fraction of the model's total mechanisms, it represents a fascinating step towards understanding how language models work.

🚀 Community Highlights

We're getting back in full swing with our newsletter and even better - we're hosting our next "AI + Coding for Non-Coders" session this Friday at 12pm-1pm online via lu.ma!

This week's session will focus on how to Transcribe Audio files without writing a single line of code - creating a tool that you can reuse whenever you need it. No more hitting those way-to-early free usage limits on commercial transcription services ;)

I'll be hosting these sessions regularly now, with various different topics each time. They are hands-on, practical sessions where you'll learn actual skills you can apply immediately - not just theoretical insights.

🤝 Get Involved

  • Share Your Story: Building in NY in Tech & AI? We'd love to feature you!

  • Spread the Word: Know someone who'd benefit? Forward this newsletter!

Yours, Frederike

NYTech AI+ Community

Want to be featured? Have feedback? Reply to this email or reach out on LinkedIn. Let's build it together! 🗽🚀💡