Open Source AI Week
Open Source AI Week is a community-run, decentralized celebration of open-source artificial intelligence — ten days of talks, workshops, hackathons, demo nights, panels, and office hours across the Bay Area, held together by a single belief: open source AI for everyone. The 2026 edition runs October 16–25, 2026.
Explore the week at opensourceaiweek.com →
Started by the community, for the community
Open Source AI Week began in 2024 as a grassroots effort by the open source AI community — a way to turn a scattering of independent meetups, launches, and hack nights into one shared moment for everyone building in the open. It has grown every year since. In 2025 it brought together 60+ events and 200+ participating organizations across the Bay Area, and the model is radically open: anyone — a startup, a research lab, a meetup, a nonprofit, or an informal group of friends — can host an event and add it to the shared calendar.
Owned and managed by the community
The Open Intelligence Foundation was established, in part, to make sure Open Source AI Week stays exactly that: owned and managed by the community. As an event grows in reach and prestige, so does the temptation for a single company to absorb it and quietly steer it toward its own products, its own roadmap, and its own definition of “open.”
We think that would be a loss. The whole value of Open Source AI Week is that it belongs to no one, and therefore to everyone. A neutral, non-profit steward keeps the calendar open to every contributor, keeps the stage available to competing labs and competing ideas, and keeps decisions accountable to the community. The Foundation exists to handle the continuity, logistics, and neutral coordination a decentralized event needs to survive year after year — without ever becoming the gatekeeper that decides whose work counts. An event about open technology should itself be governed in the open.
What happens during the week
The week is decentralized by design: dozens of independently hosted events, tied together by a shared calendar and a handful of community anchor moments, including:
- The Kickoff Party — the opening celebration that gathers the community in one room to set the tone and launch the week.
- The Hackathon — a hands-on build sprint where developers team up to prototype and ship new projects with open models.
- The Debates — candid, on-stage conversations that tackle the big, unresolved questions shaping the future of open AI.
- The Open Source AI Awards — a night recognizing the people and projects making standout contributions to the open source AI community.
Built by passionate people from across the ecosystem
Open Source AI Week is put together by volunteers and contributors who care deeply about keeping AI open — passionate people from across the open source AI community, including people from UC Berkeley, GitHub, a16z, Ollama, Nous Research, Prime Intellect, Black Forest Labs, Hugging Face, and Mistral. No single organization runs it; it takes the whole community, and that is exactly the point.
Get involved
Whether you want to host an event, speak, sponsor, or simply show up and meet the people building open AI, everyone is welcome. See the full schedule, browse who’s taking part, and add your own event: