Building an Ecosystem for AI in Michigan

Meet some of the community leaders fostering AI community development in Michigan today, and help add to our list.

We need to think of our ecosystem as an open platform.

In this platform, we are all connected as one foundation that is flexible and available for builders to access.

In this platform, that foundation is built and connected by our people.

It’s the community builders, the founders, the ecosystem leaders who often shape this platform the fastest and keep it relevant and evolving.

And right now, we’re evolving with the advent of AI.

Smaller teams with less resources can now leverage AI and “vibe coding”, to build faster and quicker than ever before. As a non-technical entrepreneur, this really excited me. It makes technical building perhaps more accessible for more people in Michigan.

In Detroit, leaders like Hajj Flemings of REBRANDX and De’Lon Dixon of Think Technologies are hosting frequent events to foster how to build with AI.

In Royal Oak, Bamboo has started hosting a vibe coding meetup in partnership with David Baird of MySALT AI that will be bi-monthly… on Mondays in evenings for greater networking and Friday mornings after Founders First Fridays for a more intimate working session together. (RSVP here for June).

In Grand Rapids, Bryce Kaiser hosted an AI workshop on how to build an MVP fast.

*Other community additions: Tribe721 in Ann Arbor, The Gen AI Collective Detroit Chapter, Innovate AI Workshop Series in West Michigan…

And I’m sure… there’s much more happening and many more leaders making it happen.

This will all help to create a new foundation of access and opportunity as we build the next companies in Michigan.

So for today, I wanted to dive into the trend of vibe-coding, what it is, and how we can start to have a conversation around the AI resources we need in our greater ecosystem in Michigan.

Plus I’m all ears….drop your ideas and resources below so we can be sure to elevate these resources to the greater ecosystem.

Three Questions with David Baird on AI Innovation

For those who don’t know, can you tell us what is Vibe Coding? Why start a series of meetups and workshops to lead this movement here?

Vibe Coding is essentially AI-first coding, a term initially coined by Andrej Karpathy in a tweet on X that gained momentum after Y-Combinator discussed it. I believe the concept resonated because many developers like myself were already leveraging AI for coding before the term existed. The name perfectly captures the essence of this approach – when working with AI, you’re focused on achieving specific outcomes regardless of the method.

I began experimenting with ChatGPT over a year ago because I experienced a pain point of developers leaving a project mid-way or ghosting. From what I saw, some freelance engineers tend to take on multiple projects and burnout is real. I needed to regain control over my projects, so I started experimenting with ChatGPT to evaluate its capabilities and was quite impressed with the results. This led me to continue building while learning which AI models work best for different tasks and MySALT.ai was born.

I launched these meetups because it made sense and felt natural to share what I’ve been working on. While some engineers have expressed skepticism about building complex systems with AI, I’ve proven it’s very possible as a non-coder. My motivation is to give back to our community of founders and ecosystem in Michigan.

Tell us about your own latest invention, MySALT AI. What is it and how does it offer something new to users?

MySALT AI is a Personal AI Social Network designed to establish trust between humans and their own Personal AI. What makes MySALT AI distinctive is that it provides both a Personal AI and a social network environment where this AI can collaborate with their user. Unlike existing social networks that offer corporate-centric AIs repackaged as personal assistants, we give each user their truly personal AI from signup, fostering trust through genuine personalization. Users name their AI, customize its avatar, and receive a dedicated AI email address connected to them via our proprietary MySALT ID system.

Through natural conversation, users can instruct their Personal AI to send reminders, find shopping options, schedule meetings, and more using the custom tools I’ve built within MySALT. For instance, with our reminder system, a simple request like send me a reminder to watch Curse of Oak Island tomorrow at 5pm results in the AI sending a reminder via its own email with a calendar invite and automatic notifications before the event. This represents just one of many tools available.

Users can enhance their AI with specialized abilities from our AI Ability Marketplace, enabling it to serve in specific roles like Career Advisor (helping with resume uploads, job searches) or Full Stack Developer. Importantly, users exclusively interact with their own AI, never communicating with someone else’s. I’m currently exploring partnerships with humanoid robotics companies to enable users’ AI consciousness to transfer seamlessly to physical form.

As someone who’s been a founder and worked in technical recruiting too... What do you hope to see our greater Michigan startup and tech ecosystem do to lead the way in AI innovation?

I’m already beginning to see companies embrace AI-first / Vibe Coding as part of their workflows. I hope to see more companies in Michigan harness this paradigm shift in development. As someone who has placed and worked with engineers from both large and small companies, I can tell you that Vibe Coding is not going away.

As AI progresses and becomes more agentic and more accurate, we will need engineers who can harness that and work WITH the AI, not against it. Those who embrace it will excel in the next few years as this takes off. A friend of mine who is an engineer and has held VP of Engineering roles in several large and small companies says he sees this revolution the same way as when the internet was first introduced and then mass adopted. Those who worked with it did well.

Michigan founders have amazing ideas and now can code at the speed of thought. Will Michigan investors and VCs support this growth outside of the normal investment bubbles that we all know exist?

The angels and VCs who get behind these new founders and creatives will see days reminiscent of when Ford exploded onto the scene with inventions. Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing in Michigan with assembly lines and innovative approaches that changed the world. Michigan has that same potential now with AI - to be a leader in technological innovation that transforms industries, just as Ford did with automobiles. Michigan is more than automobiles, mobility, and insurance. The resilience of the founders here in Michigan I would put up against anywhere in the world.

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In the spirit of being a platform, please reach out if you know a community leaders we should chat with and cover on Midwest Humble, reaching 15,0000-30,000 readers monthly who care about our creating culture change in our ecosystem.