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 Insights:

  • Code Non-Code AI Supporters for your Ideas

  • The Top 100 AI Leaders on Linkedin

• Community Updates

📅 Upcoming AI Events in Town

Next Week:

• Mon, 7th Apr - Gen AI Built on Bedrock NYC - Join in to learn about new startups and their products in a range of demos of generative AI products built on Bedrock

• Tue, 8th Apr - AI & The Culture - This meetup is for Black creatives ready to explore how AI intersects with culture, storytelling, and creativity and to figure out how to use AI to have their voices heard while staying true to themselves

• Tue, 8th Apr - Scaling Engineering Organizations - AI is not the main topic of this night, but hey, it’s at Duolingo (aren’t you all excited to meet the owl in real ;)) and the CTO of Robin AI shares together with others how they build their engineering organizations

• Tue, 8th Apr - AI/ML Conversations Meetup - Enjoy an evening of presentations and networking all around AI and Machine Learning. Speakers will be announced

• Tue, 8th Apr - Hybrid: Professional Readiness of LLMs in Financial Regulations - Xiao-Yang Liu - Join Xiao sharing his paper and showcase his FinGPT - an open-source counterpart of BloombergGPT on financial regulations, expect a seminar-style event

• Wed, 9th Apr - Opportunities in the Next Evolution of the Domain Name System - Ever felt .ai domains are overly expensive? and .com’s are gone and .io’s are still rather expensive? Then join in and learn about the opening up of those - about AI? Not necessarily, but an option to learn how to build in the AI sector with your unique domain ending ;)

• Wed, 9th Apr - ArtificialRuby.ai NYC Meetup - This is for techies, for those developing with Ruby and asking yourself - how can I program AI with Ruby? If that is for you, join and enjoy demos of AI apps built with Ruby

• Wed, 9th Apr - Book Talk with Investor, Professor, and Author Jeff Bussgang in Conversation with Bloomberg Journalist Walter Frick - Have you asked yourself how AI-native you are? And do you know that 25% of YC startups have 90% of your code written by AI? If you want to be ahead in the age of AI, you need to integrate AI into your work and Jeff talks about that while presenting his new book “The Experimentation Machine”.

• Wed, 9th Apr - NYC 🗽 GenAI Companies Building in NYC (Hosted by The AI Furnace) - Do you want to be inspired and/or inspire others with your product demos? Then this is the event for you. Listen to demos of AI products and join other AI builders and enthusiasts alike. 

• Wed, 9th Apr - Tech Gather NYC April Meetup - Join for a relaxing get together to find down and mix and mingle with the tech community like coders, UI designers and solution finders in a pub around the corner

• Wed, 9th Apr - New York dbt Meetup - You work with data and want to socialize with those that do too? And are interested in and building dbt? Then this is for you

• Thu, 10th Apr - 🥯+🤖 AI Bagels Biotech Edition (with Bits in Bio and Dimension) - Interested in AI and Bagels and more on the technical side of things? Then join in to talk about, well, bagels, cream cheese and LLMs

• Thu, 10th Apr - "Finding PMF in the Age of AI" with Jeff Bussgang (Flybridge Capital Partners) - You were not able to make it on Wednesday to learn from Jeff"‘s AI Experimentation Book Launch event? Then you have another chance with this event, moderated by Andrew Yeung.

• Thu, 10th Apr - Fun (SPC Demo Night) - Interested in AI Product Demos? Then join South Park Commons to see some joyful and creative AI-native experiences at this meetup

• Thu, 10th Apr - GenAI Collective - NYC Demo Night - What are some of the hottest AI startup in town? You want to know what they build? Then join GenAI Collective’s event to learn about 8 bright AI ideas and see the products’s demos

• Fri, 11th Apr - MCP Research & Discussion Night - Are you technical and want to learn how to build with AI tools? Specifically the MCP = Model Context Protocol by Anthropic? Then this is for you.

The Week After:

• Wed, 16th Apr - The Fundamentals of Machine Learning - Want to understand the basics of AI and Machine Learning? Mathematical theorems, real-world data sets, feature recognition in images and videos and more? Then this meetup is for you

• Thu, 17th Apr - Navigating AI in Women's Healthcare: Insights from VC & Founders - Do you want to learn about challenges, trends and opportunities in the healthcare industry for women specifically? Then join La Creme de la STEM, GenZ Tea and Columbia Healthcare Ventures for a panel discussion

• Thu, 17th Apr - AI Meetup (April): Agentic AI - This is for you if you are interested in deep tech talks on Gen AI about building a state-f-the-art AI web researcher and building a self-improving AI agent - expect technical presentations, you should not be afraid of code 😉 

• Thu, 17th Apr - Generative AI & Capital Markets II - This is for you if you want to learn more about AI in Finance and Capital Markets from Ashok Mittal and other finance and AI professionals sharing their insights

• Thu, 17th Apr - Building Smarter AI: How RAG works & why it matters in Financial Services - This meetup hosted by SurrealDB is all about RAG, about tracing LLM implications and discussing real-world challenges like data privacy and compliance - made for developers techies alike

• Sat, 19th Apr - LeRobot Arm Hackathon NYC - Ever wanted to build a robot arm? Then this hackathon is for you with all the hardware provided, you get to build something epic as a team of 4-5 people over the weekend

After That:

• 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 the increasing power of AI? If that is a question you are interested in, then this is the panel discussion for you to get new insights and perspectives (morning event)

• Tue, 22nd Apr - BitcoinSV for AGI Using instant transactions with SPV and Teranode - This meetup is about testing the BitcoinSV and its role in AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) as well as touching upon data integrity and security, decentralization and monetization

• 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 speakers and networking and more details to come

• 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

• Thu, 1st May - The Future of Ethics in Machine Learning & AI by Etsy & LXAI - Head over to Brooklyn to discuss the ethics of AI, more speakers and details to be announced soon

• Wed, 7th May - Mindstone NY AI Meetup - Join in for Mindstone’s monthly AI meetup where three speakers share their insights about how they leverage AI for their operations, products and growth followed by mix and mingling with some pizza

• June 2nd - June 8th 2025 - New York Tech Week is coming up. With lots of AI events. Check it out to secure your spot early on.

💡 AI Highlights, Insights & Ideas

Nr. 1: How to use AI to help you build your product without coding skills

Do you have all these ideas in your minds, but need technical skills to bring them to life? Then look no further but straight into AI.

And you likely already did - because AI makes your life so much easier, and now, there even is a word for it - “vibe programming”.

But what are the tools and programs you can use to build with AI, even as a non-coder?

• Lovable - Great for simple websites and landing pages. Creates the code for you directly, it needs little supervision from you, but the moment it gets more complex, you need help and do not know what the AI did. Not good, but for basic stuff (landing pages and more) very effective and its design is beautiful compared to other tools.

• Cursor - If you tried diving into code before and are not afraid to see code, then this is for you - It is cheaper than Lovable and Claude Code and does a good job living right there where you code. At the start you can tell it to program what you look to achieve and it comes up with a good first code structure

• Claude & Claude Code - Both work great - the Claude Chat where you simply type in what you want and the Claude Code that lives in your code and programs full features for you, while you ask the right questions and direct it towards your objectives. Both in junction are magic and very powerful. Keep in mind though, that the Claude living in your code is rather expensive with up to $5 per session. This adds up over time.

• Cline - Another great one, living directly in Visual Studio Code and gives you a similar experience as Cursor and other similar tools like Windsurf. Just type in what you need and it does it for you. You ahve a problem, it fixes it for you. You want to ask some questions about your code, it does it.

There are many more. And they prove one important thing - It becomes more easy and achievable for all of us to bring our tech products to life. And if you want to know how they look like, join our Online Meeting on Fri, 18th of April at 12pm for an hour of diving into some powerful workflows for bringing your tech products to life as a non-techie with the help of AI.

Nr. 2: The Top 100 Most Influential AI Voices on Linkedin

Favikon just released a list of the top 100 most influential AI voices on Linkedin and I spotted some of the names and people I follow on Linkedin plus a bunch I never heard of - for sure a time to dig deeper and learn who has a say on Linkedin and what do they mainly write about.

Here are some of the people that were among the top 100:

• Andreas Horn - Head of AIOps at IBM and German living in Hamburg, posting about AI with some stunning and very helpful pictures to explain common AI concepts and how to build AI models and workflows

• Andrew Ng - AI Educator and Innovator, Co-Founder of Coursera and founder of DeepLearning.AI, Is the one that can for sure teach you AI concepts and how to build with AI. Check out his courses and learn how to build AI Agents with crewAI and more

• Ruben Hassid - The Social Media + AI person on Linkedin you cannot not meet. He posts about AI, how to write content in the age of AI, how to use his tool EaszGen to do so and other news and insights about AI - practical-oriented and informative

• and many more.. Check out the full post to meet them all: The List 😉 

🧠 AI Innovation Insights

Research Spotlight: Understanding the Internal Biology of Large Language Models

An interesting and rather long paper from Anthropic reveals fascinating insights into the inner workings of Claude 3.5 Haiku through a novel, so-called "circuit tracing" methodology. The research shows that:

• LLMs perform sophisticated multi-step reasoning "in their head" before producing outputs

• Models engage in both forward planning (considering multiple future possibilities) and backward planning (working backwards from goals)

• Evidence of primitive "metacognitive" circuits that allow models to assess their own knowledge

• Models use both language-specific and language-independent features when processing multilingual content

• Detailed mechanisms for handling medical diagnoses, mathematical operations, and identifying when to refuse harmful requests

• Circuit analysis of "jailbreak" vulnerabilities that can cause models to respond to harmful prompts

• Mechanisms that determine when models hallucinate versus recognize knowledge boundaries

• Key Takeaway: The research demonstrates that 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 significant step toward understanding how language models work, akin to early biological investigations that revealed cellular structures invisible to the naked eye.

🚀 Community Highlights

Restarting & Rebuilding

You saw quite some weeks of a newsletter pause from me partially because of personal projects and partially because of the development of a new product I am working on that got me pre-occupied more than I expected.

But here we are, back writing the newsletter, back to our roots with the NYC AI+ concept with a slight change - NYTech AI+. The newsletter stays the same, the event series follows with a mixture of various AI+ events (stay tuned) and we will highlight AI community members, builders and creators we meet along the way.

🤝 Get Involved

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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! 🗽🚀💡