EdinburghAI

AI is going to reshape everything. The students learning it today will be the ones deciding how. Our job is to make sure as many of them as possible get the chance to build, learn, and lead.

I co-founded EdinburghAI in December 2023 during my second year at the University of Edinburgh with Pascual Merita Torres. We discovered that dozens of students were independently looking for an ML-focused community — so we built one.

Within two years we grew to 1,000+ members. The society runs two-tiered workshops — beginner-friendly ML fundamentals and advanced reading groups on cutting-edge papers and tools like DSPy. All the workshop materials are open-sourced on GitHub.

We bring in speakers from Google DeepMind, Spotify, Amazon, and Anthropic to share their work in areas spanning robotics, recommendation systems, and frontier AI research.

The AI Expo

Our flagship event is the Edinburgh AI Expo — a science-fair-style competition held in Appleton Tower. Students apply at the start of the year, choose a project, build it over a month, then present to a panel of academics, industry professionals, and researchers.

The most recent Expo featured three tracks:

• Difficult Challenge — tackle a technically ambitious problem
• Societal Impact — build something positive for the world
• Research — push the frontier of AI knowledge

Prizes across each track: £1,000 cash for first place, £300 cash for second, and £300 in Anthropic API credits for third.

The Anthropic Hackathon

We partnered with Anthropic for a hackathon with a twist: build the most useless project possible. Over 250 people showed up, we gave out loads of food, and it was one of the best events we ever ran.

The mission has always been the same: empower students and the broader community, transforming them into the next generation of AI builders and researchers.