The AI Community for Human Flourishing
About AI Socratic
AI Socratic is a decentralized community of engineers, researchers, and founders representing the excellence in AI. Our mission is to ensure everyone can own and benefit from AI.
Our story
In 2024 Gen AI was a hot topic. We started going to AI meetups in NYC, but we soon got bored, because they all turned out to be networking events — fun but not much advanced alpha and learning from it. We felt the need to discuss research papers, new models, and AI projects. So 7 of us got together in Brooklyn over dinner and spent 4 hours jamming about AI. We met again a month later. Federico then hosted an event at Station 3, posted it on Luma, and 30+ people showed up. Fun fact: Anissa — Fed's wife — cooked the dinners herself every month. Once the events passed 50 people we brought in sponsors and catering, but she still jazzes the food up with something sweet, a salad, or some fruit. Since then we've grown into a staple of the NYC AI community — and a global network of chapters.
Our mission is to ensure everyone can own and benefit from AI. We believe AI should not be shaped by a small number of institutions. Its future must emerge from a diverse, global community of thinkers, builders, and practitioners.
All interactions are guided by the Socratic method — dialogues over debates, collaboration over competition, and collective curiosity over individual status. We pursue that through community (events, workshops, shared knowledge), open source (code and models), and decentralization (autonomous global chapters).
How our events work
Every chapter follows the format we honed in NYC: a monthly symposium with engineers, researchers, and founders working in AI. It runs like a show — with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
- 1
6:00 PM
Dinner
Doors open and dinner starts. We eat, drink, and meet new people in a laid-back setting — good food, easy conversation, and music to set the vibes.
- 2
6:30 PM
Intro and selfie
We go around the room with a quick round of introductions — who you are and what you're working on — then squeeze everyone into one frame. Every chapter takes a selfie to capture the room and shares it with the others.
- 3
7:00 PM
Socratic Dialogues
The heart of the night: a moderated conversation on the latest in AI — new models, research papers, philosophy, geopolitics — structured around the last month blog post. Everyone is encouraged to contribute, and experts on the topic share what they know.
- 4
8:30 PM
Presentations & demos
Bring a problem, an architecture challenge, or something you've built and learned from. Short show-and-tell sessions meant to level up everyone in the room.
- 5
9:00 PM
Networking
We close out at a bar nearby, where the group conversation splinters into many smaller ones.
What — and who — to expect
Every event is a unique experience, often in a new location — but always with the same passion, the same quality of people, and the same quality of content.
What makes it different from most tech events is that everyone actively participates instead of sitting and listening to a speaker. People leave having made valuable connections, having learned something new, and having had fun — many tell us it's their favorite tech event.
We keep it high-signal and low-noise: we review every application and approve people who seriously work in AI or an adjacent field — and we welcome experts from other disciplines who bring value to the room. The community grows by word of mouth, invitation by invitation, without losing its roots.
Chapters
A chapter is a local, autonomous node of the network — run by ambassadors who share the mission and host the monthly symposium in their city. Each chapter follows the same format and the same quality bar, with its own community and its own flavor. These are our active chapters:
The ambassadors
Chapters are run by ambassadors — engineers, researchers, and founders who host the symposiums, moderate the dialogues, and grow the community in their city. Most started as regulars at another chapter's dinners and brought the format home.
Federico UlfoFounder — New York, Shanghai
Ivo GalicFounding Ambassador — New York, Washington DC
Roberto StagiAmbassador — Milan
Jorge OrdovásAmbassador — Madrid
Devinder SodhiAmbassador — San Francisco, Shanghai
Paulo FonsecaAmbassador — Lisbon
Beyond the events
Hands-on learning
Workshops
Hands-on technical sessions with senior practitioners: agents, evals, fine-tuning, and production AI engineering.
Browse the workshopsCasual meetups
Cafes
Casual, small-group meetups at coffee shops — the lightest way to meet the community between events.
Find a cafeFor companies
Consulting
AI strategy, implementation, and team training from the network's senior engineers and researchers — an Anthropic Certified Consulting Partner.
Work with usNew event series
Frontier Stack
An event series bringing together LLM labs, neoclouds, and AI startups to present frontier AI solutions, with Socratic-style dialogues among top engineers, researchers, and founders.
Explore the seriesGet involved
Membership is free — join an event and check in. Meet the team on the home page, or writing about us? See the press kit.