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Austin Meetup Recap, Hack Fair This Weekend + AI House @ SxSW!
Sign up for the Hack Fair this weekend!
AITX Team
February 28, 2025
Hello everyone! AITX Team here with more updates this week.
If you’re new here, welcome! 👋 At AITX, we aim to:
Connect you with like-minded peers passionate about AI.
Provide a space for sharing ideas and receiving feedback on AI projects you’re building.
Share helpful tools and invaluable resources.
Before we jump into the regular news, a few housekeeping items:
February AITX Meetups:
Our upcoming meetups:
Austin Meetup: March 25 | sign up here!
To stay in the loop on all our monthly meetups and other community organized events, subscribe to our AITX calendar here.
Check out our Community Directory:
We recently started a community directory where you can fill out your profile and find other members of the AITX community.
If you haven’t filled out your profile yet, please follow the link HERE and submit your information.
We want to get to know you better! Please fill out this form if you haven’t already:
2nd Austin AI Community Hackathon This Weekend!
webAI’s & AITX’s Austin AI Community Hackathon is this weekend.
A huge thank you for the support from webAI, RedHat, Toolhouse, Meta, and Groq for making this possible.
When: From February 28 - March 1
🚪 Registration is now closed
We’ve reached capacity for hackers. We still encourage you to come to the Hack Fair the next day!
🎡 Sign up for the Hack Fair!
The Hack Fair will be a science-fair style showcase open to the broader Austin community where participants will demo their projects to the public for a chance to win the Community Choice Prize.
🏠️ AI House @ SxSW
AITX is excited to announce a 2-day event in collaboration with Manifold Labs, Akash, Toolhouse, and Groq: AI House @ SxSW.
In the spirit of SxSW, this event will shine a light on local AI talent to show the best of what the Austin AI ecosystem has to offer. There will be company demos, fireside chats, panels and opportunities to connect.
We’d like to thank Manifold Labs and Akash for opening up their new DeAI space for this event.
📝 Register Now!
Come out to support local AI companies, learn from others in the space and have some free food & drink.
In this week’s edition you’re getting:
🤠 Meetup Recap
5 Upcoming Events
3 AI Community Stories
1 Community Highlight
So let’s jump in!
Austin AITX Meetup Recap
AITX Austin Meetup | February 2025
We had 6 demos at our last meetup, so let’s dive into what they were!
Perigon presented their context engine designed to help users perform deeper research. They showcased several components of their new SaaS product including their chatbot, signals product, and search functionality. They also mentioned that while they've had an API available for the past two years, they've now built a user interface on top of it!
They are looking for beta testers so you can learn more at perigon.io or access their beta directly at beta.goperigon.com.
In their demo, TestDriver presented their AI QA agent designed to simplify the creation and maintenance of software tests. They explained that their tool integrates with GitHub and works within CICD pipelines to develop comprehensive test plans and generate end-to-end UI tests.
Recursive AI introduced their approach to AI agent frameworks. Rather than using traditional explicit workflows, they've developed a virtual world where AI templates can be deployed as agents that communicate and collaborate toward shared goals.
Red Hat presented their open source project InstructLab, which focuses on fine-tuning large language models. They explained that InstructLab allows users to take any open source model from Hugging Face and customize it for specific use cases.
Headline presented their personalized local news platform developed for Washington State. They explained that as a byproduct of building their newsletter service, they created a comprehensive data media monitoring pipeline that aggregates information from various news sources.
In their demo, SambaNova Systems showcased their proprietary AI accelerator hardware that serves as an alternative to traditional GPUs. They highlighted their system's impressive performance metrics, including speeds of over 2,400 tokens per second on LLAMA models and nearly 200 tokens per second on DeepSeq R1, all achieved using a single node. SambaNova demonstrated their cloud platform and encouraged attendees to test it themselves by signing up through a QR code or visiting sambanova.ai to experience these speeds firsthand.
UPCOMING EVENTS
When: Friday March 7 | 8:00 AM - 8:00 PM
Where: Register to see address
What: An xclusive event tailored for leaders and influencers. Enjoy premium amenities designed to enhance your day, including reservable conference rooms, a private mothers’ room, high-speed WiFi, luggage drop, and limited Perigon VIP user parking
When: Wednesday, March 5 | 5:30 PM - 9:00 PM CST
Where: Austin, Texas Austin, Texas · Austin, Texas, TX
What: Dive into the cutting edge of AI evaluation at this exclusive meetup for AI developers, engineers, and researchers! As AI systems grow in complexity, the ability to evaluate and optimize both multimodal models and agents is more critical than ever.
When: Monday, March 3 | 5:00 PM - 8:30 PM CST
Where: Meta Austin’s 3rd & Shoal office 607 West 3rd St Austin, TX
What: You’re invited! Register Here by February 26 to join Meta during SXSW EDU for a reception with appetizers, drinks, and a panel discussion about the value of open-source AI and immersive tech for education. Experience Meta AI demos on Ray Ban Meta AI glasses, try Quest 3S mixed reality headsets, and network with innovators, developers, and educators building for education. If you are using Llama to make an impact with education, skills development, or job training, the team at Meta wants to meet you! Please contact [email protected] if you want to get involved with this reception.
When: Sunday, March 9 | 8:30 AM – 6:30 PM CST
Where: 309 E 3rd Street Austin, TX
What: SeedAI House programming will explore the leading edge of AI and public policy, featuring an electric mix of key policymakers, industry visionaries, and subject matter experts. Register here to join Meta and SeedAI for a day full of panel discussions, open-source AI demos led by developers from Texas and across the country, and experience Ray Ban Meta AI glasses and Quest 3S mixed reality headsets.
When: Thursday, March 6 | 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM CST
Where: Capital Factory 701 Brazos St, 16th Floor · Austin, TX
What: A monthly mini-hack session for developers all over the Austin area to build cool stuff related to AI. The first Thursday of each month, they host a meetup revolving around a certain theme or AI technology, like Voice AI, Large Language Models, Computer Vision, etc.
COMMUNITY STORIES
Apple will build a 250,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Houston to produce servers for its AI personal assistant used across its device ecosystem.
Why it matters: This factory represents a significant piece of Apple's broader $500 billion U.S. investment plan, strengthening Texas' position as a growing hub for AI infrastructure development.
Need-to-know:
The facility is expected to begin operations in 2026 as part of Apple's four-year investment strategy
Apple plans to hire approximately 20,000 new employees nationwide, focusing on R&D, software development, and AI specializations
CEO Tim Cook highlighted the company's economic impact, noting Apple paid $19 billion in U.S. taxes in 2024 alone
Learn more here.
Meta is reportedly in talks to build a new AI-focused data center campus with potential costs exceeding $200 billion, with Louisiana, Wyoming, and Texas under consideration as possible locations.
Why it matters: If confirmed, this would represent one of the largest infrastructure investments in AI history, significantly expanding the company's computing capacity for artificial intelligence development.
Need-to-know:
Senior Meta executives have reportedly visited potential sites this month, though a Meta spokesperson has denied the report as "pure speculation"
The news follows CEO Mark Zuckerberg's announcement last month that Meta plans to spend up to $65 billion this year on AI infrastructure
This potential investment reflects the accelerating AI infrastructure arms race, with Microsoft planning $80 billion and Amazon expecting to exceed $75 billion in data center spending
Learn more here.
Baylor University and China Spring ISD are integrating AI into their educational programs, with Baylor launching a dedicated AI course this fall and local schools testing AI translation tools.
Why it matters: As AI becomes increasingly prevalent across industries, Texas educators are preparing students with both practical skills and ethical considerations for navigating an AI-powered future.
Need-to-know:
Baylor's new media professor Dr. Alec Tefertiller will teach a course helping students understand AI applications in their future careers
The university curriculum will cover both technical skills and ethical considerations around AI use and disclosure
At China Spring Elementary, teachers are already testing AI translation tools to help communicate with ESL students
Learn more here.
COMMUNITY HIGHLIGHT
This week, we’re highlighting two of Meta’s engineers who will be on-site for the Hackathon this weekend: Kai Wu & Hardik Shah
Hardik Shah
Kai Wu
Kai worked on the Llama 3 releases and evaluation reproducibility. He's a main contributor to Meta's official Llama cookbook GitHub repo, writing tutorials and solving with GitHub issues. Kai now works on Llama Stack, including building new apps.
Hardik is AI Engineer @ Meta. I've been with Meta for the past 8+ years and have worked on various AI projects from computer vision (alt text for visually impaired) to AI on Ray Ban Meta glasses and now on Llama. Currently, he is a core maintainer on Llama Stack.
Here is their message to the community:
From Kai:
I have enjoyed participating in hackathons since my college days and have attended many. I am excited to see the innovative projects that can be built on top of the Llama Stack.
From Hardik:
Super excited to see what can be built on Llama Stack and how we can help everyone out there to build faster in open source.
That’s all for now, folks!
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