VAI17 | Vancouver AI Community Meetup Web Summit 2025 Edition

While Web Summit suits pitched "AI solutions," we gathered in a planetarium to witness actual humans using AI to solve real problems. Gabriel using custom GPTs for his council campaign, Carol Anne feeding colonial legislation to AI and diagnosing systematic tomfuckery, Kevin building Hollywood-grade first alien contact footage for $10000.

This is revolution built by people who give a fuck.

The Real Opening

Gabriel George Sr brought ceremony. His people went from 10,000 to dozens through European diseases. Four fluent Halkomelem speakers remain across 10,000 Coast Salish people. We're building AI that amplifies his voice—his "six pillars" became "house posts" because words carry worlds.

Global Perspective

Vipul Kansal flew 37 hours from India. His $500M company makes AI shoes, but he talked about finding a rural family business where three generations refuse other brands because "it's in our blood." His success metric: growing from 5,000 to 10,000 employees because prosperity means more families fed.

Technical Fire

Kushal Goenka exposed why search still sucks: we built the future on a lie. The open web became a private index. Reddit sells our conversations to OpenAI for $60M while we can't access our own contributions. Aaron Swartz died fighting this battle.

Indigenous AI Justice

Carol Anne Hilton fed the Indian Act into AI, personified it, then ran diagnostics. Result: severely disturbed individual exhibiting systematic abuse patterns. Her Indigenomics Institute found a $200B Indigenous economy GDP calculations miss. "Economy as ceremony"—technology serving cultural values.

Creative Destruction

Kevin Friel built complete alien first-contact news in 2.5 days using VO3. Traditional cost: $100,000, three months. His cost: $10,000, two days. Tools evolving monthly—adapt or die.

What We're Building

Fifty-five core memberships. Constituency building. Launched BC + AI Ecosystem Industry Association. Subgroups spawning subgroups. Distributed leadership, no guru dependency.

The Challenge

Every successful alternative gets co-opted. Open web became private. Social platforms became extraction machines. How do we build something that can't be absorbed?

Answer isn't in code—it's in culture. Gabriel's ceremony, Carol Anne's values, monthly gathering grounding technology in relationship.

Revolution will be distributed, polite because we're Canadian, but not corporate.

Keep building. Keep gathering. Keep ceremony alive.

Next meetup: Last Wednesday monthly | Core membership: vancouver.bc-ai.net

Sponsors: Dmitri Sportsman Real Estate, SEGEV Law, Sons of Vancouver Distillery, Michelle Diamond Photography, Victor Serbin Documentary Spotlights, Philippe Pasquier MetaCreation Lab, MötleyKrüg Media, TheUpgrade.ai, Creative Mornings Vancouver

The future belongs to people who show up.