What we’re about
Artificial Intelligence is having a “moment” right now, and Tampa Bay Artificial Intelligence Meetup’s goal is to prepare Tampa Bay’s tech and tech-adjacent professionals for this moment.
Our primary goal is to learn about the practical use and development of AI applications — that’s right, we’ll spend a lot of time getting our hands dirty either using AI tools or coding AI applications! Many of our sessions will be “do it along with the presenter” exercises, where we’ll work as a group learning how to use or implement something AI-related.
We’ll also have sessions where we’ll learn about AI in all its forms, discuss its promises and pitfalls, and share ideas, but these sessions will stay focused on how you can put this knowledge to practical use.
This meetup is open to everyone interested in artificial intelligence and related fields (including data science, machine learning, robotics, sensors, IoT). If you want to learn about AI and put it to good use or build your own AI-based applications, this meetup is for you!
Upcoming events (1)
See all- Intro to AI agents with MCP: Model Context Protocol!Embarc Collective, Tampa, FL
Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, and others are great for taking in natural language questions and producing complex but useful natural language replies. But by themselves, they can’t do anything except output text. Until recently, the way to connect LLMs to other systems was to develop custom code for each LLM and each online system it connects to.
Enter MCP, short for “Model Context Protocol.” Introduced to world by Anthropic not too long ago, it’s an open source, open standard that gives AI models connection to external data sources and tools. You could describe MCP as “a universal API for AIs to interact with online services.”
Join the Tampa Bay Artificial Intelligence Meetup and Tampa Bay Python on Wednesday, June 18 at Embarc Collective in an introduction to MCP! We’ll explain what it is, why it was made and how it came about, and then show you actual working code by building a simple MCP server connected to an LLM. Joey will demonstrate a couple of examples of MCP in action, and they’ll be examples that you can take home and experiment with!
Bring your laptop — you’ll have the opportunity to try out the MCP demos for yourself!
And yes, there’ll be food (most likely pizza) and water and soft drinks will be provided. If that doesn’t work for you, feel free to bring your own.
This event is possible thanks to the Tampa Bay Tech Meetup Scholarship, which was provided by Bank of America and Embarc Collective. Thanks, both of you; we couldn’t do this without you!
