Engineering the Future of Media - Seattle Community Meetup

Join us for an evening of engineering talks, live demos, and networking with Qdrant, Adobe, Incantio, Superoptimal, the AI Collective, Code & Coffee, and AI House.

About The Topic

Media is becoming machine-readable. Music, audio, and video are no longer just files to store and stream. They are signals that AI systems can search, understand, and help create.

That shift raises new engineering questions. How do you find a song by how it sounds instead of how it’s tagged? How do you make a huge music catalog discoverable for the people who need the right track? And how do you build generative tools for video and sound that keep creators in control?

We’re bringing together engineers, researchers, and builders working across audio search, music, and generative media to explore the systems powering the next era of content.

Expect real architectures, practical demos, honest trade-offs, and plenty of time to meet fellow builders. No sales pitches.

🗓️ Event Agenda

5:30pm — Doors open | Food, drinks & networking

6:10pm — Welcome from AI House

6:15pm — Qdrant: Your Perfect Band: Auditory AI Discovery and Search

6:40pm — Incantio: Finding the Right Track: AI-Powered Music Discovery

7:05pm — Adobe: Creators in Control: Building Generative AI Tools for Video and Sound

7:30pm — Community demos (3 × 5 minutes)

7:45pm — Networking, food & drinks

🎧 Talk 1: Your Perfect Band: Auditory AI Discovery and Search

Neil Kanungo | Qdrant - [LinkedIn]

Most music search still runs on titles, genres and tags. But what makes you love a band lives in the sound itself: the mood, the texture, the voice.

Neil will explore how audio embeddings and vector search let us discover music by how it sounds, and how those same ideas power recommendations that feel personal rather than generic.

He’ll walk through how audio is turned into vectors, how similarity search and filtering work together, and where the engineering trade-offs show up between accuracy, latency and scale.

Expect a practical look at building auditory search and discovery systems, and maybe a few new bands to add to your playlist.

🎸 Talk 2: Finding the Right Track: AI-Powered Music Discovery for Independent Artists

Danny Newcomb | Incantio - LinkedIn

Half of today’s music market is independent. Yet finding the right track for an ad, a film or a video can still mean digging through massive catalogs by hand.

Danny, a longtime Seattle musician turned founder, will share how Incantio uses AI to catalog and recommend independent music to creators, editors and music supervisors.

He’ll cover what it takes to make a large catalog searchable by mood, tempo and vocals, and how AI can help independent artists get discovered, licensed and paid fairly.

🎬 Talk 3: Creators in Control: Building Generative AI Tools for Video and Sound

Bryan Wang | Adobe - LinkedIn

Video is the most consumed medium in the world, yet making it well still takes deep expertise and hours of manual work. Generative AI is changing that fast.

Bryan will take us inside Adobe Research’s work on AI tools for video and audio creation, from generating soundtracks that fit a video to expanding stories with generative video.

He’ll share how these ideas move from research prototype to shipped product, and the design and engineering choices that keep creators in the driver’s seat while AI handles the heavy lifting.

⚡ Community Demos

Three builders from the Seattle community, five minutes each. Short, live and focused on something real you can build with music, audio or media AI. (Lineup announced soon.)

👋 Who Should Join?

Whether you’re working on audio or music AI, search and recommendations, generative video, creative tools, or media infrastructure, you’ll find plenty to dig into.

Come for the engineering insights. Stay for the food, drinks, and people. 🍛🍻

Space is limited, register early.

Who Are We

The AI Collective is a global non-profit building the human layer for the AI era. We unite 200,000+ leaders, builders, and stakeholders across 100+ forums worldwide to democratize the frontier, build trust, and coordinate how society navigates the rapid acceleration of technological progress.

Code & Coffee is a meetup for developers to make friends and grow, active in over 30 cities. 100% volunteer-led and volunteer-run, with 80,000+ devs and growing.

AI House is Seattle’s hub for AI founders, researchers, engineers and investors. Founded by the AI2 Incubator and based at Pier 70 on the Seattle waterfront, it brings together a community, an incubator and capital to help build the next generation of AI-first companies.

Superoptimal runs technical meetups and workshops for AI engineers, bringing practitioners together around real production systems.