Two Wednesday evenings a month, you will find J Langley on campus at HudsonAlpha — welcoming both regulars and newcomers to discuss all things AI. Langley, Chief Technical Officer at CohesionForce, Inc., is also the founder of Huntsville AI, LLC.

The organization was created to democratize and share knowledge about emerging technologies in and around Artificial Intelligence.

Langley traces its inception to several earlier networking organizations in Huntsville. One of those was CoWorking Night Huntsville, which brought together creative professionals who were “curious about tinkering with and building things. It was just a cool place to meet people that were interested in doing stuff,” said Langley.

Designers, writers, photographers, and marketers each created interest-specific communities at CoWorking Night. It was there, in 2018, that Langley began leading a group that focused on researching and experimenting with Artificial Intelligence.

After spending the pandemic era on Zoom, Huntsville AI, LLC found a home at HudsonAlpha, which has generously allowed the group to use meeting space for the past year and a half.

Though CoWorking Nights have since been discontinued, the collaborative, welcoming spirit that animated those evenings shows up in the culture of the organization today.

“We are just a group of folks who are curious about AI,” said Langley. “We like to play around with it, we like to help other people learn about it. We seriously believe that you don’t have to go get a Ph.D. to be able to do this stuff.”

Langley says that while the meetings sometimes get “down in the weeds,” they hope to be a group that is widely inclusive of experts and amateurs alike.

“We have folks in the group that are attorneys, we have people in the group that are designers, we have people that are writers, we have people that are — of course — computer scientists,” said Langley.

Langley wants to show that working with AI does not have to be intimidating.

“A lot of what we’ve been working on is helping people who aren’t traditionally working in computer science or AI. How do they learn it? How do they get to know it? We just walk them through it,” Langley told the Business Journal. “If you watch me set up something and do something with OpenAI or with ChatGPT you see it’s not hard. Sometimes people just need to see it in person.”

The founder said the group frequently appeals to workers who may be the only person on their team, or in their company, who have been tasked with utilizing AI in their work. For these people, Huntsville AI, LLC provides both a sounding board and a relief from professional isolation.

Langley has purposefully kept the focus of the group on education and networking — rather than for-profit ventures.

“We have intentionally not tried to make this a business incubator. We are not trying to create startups in AI. There are other places in town that do that. They’re good at it,” said Langley.

His tireless efforts at education extend to the next generation, who he hopes to help prepare for careers in this space.

“We have done a couple of sessions for the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) chapter over at UAH. We’ve also done two medical-plus-AI hackathons for Bob Jones High School, that was fun,” said Langley.

The group also provides technical mentorship to young people who participate in HudsonAlpha’s annual Tech Challenge and NASA’s Space Apps Challenge.

As part of this focus on community engagement and education, Huntsville AI’s past presentations are available on GitHub. The community maintains a repository of work that goes back to their founding.

“With the speed that AI changes, most of what we did up through 2020 is obsolete. It’d be like pulling out your slide rule and everybody looks at you funny,” quipped Langley.

The rapidity of the change only motivates Langley. He knows that AI is going to look different in a year than it does now.

When asked to speculate on the future of AI, Langley laughed. He’s witnessed enough change in a brief amount of time to know better than to try to forecast what is next for this emerging technology.

Suggestions for Wednesday night topics are accepted and Langley welcomes guest speakers. There is no cost for membership in Huntsville AI.

Huntsville AI, LLC will hold a Summer Social on May 29 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at Stovehouse.

The group’s next content-based session will cover “Law and AI” and will be held at HudsonAlpha on June 12 from 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.