Best AI communities
AI subreddits, Discord and Slack servers, forums and events worth joining, with official join links, five to start with, and a CSV download.
This is a list of AI communities worth joining: subreddits, official Discord and Slack servers, forums and in-person events, each with its official join link. Start with the five below, and join three communities, not thirty.
Updated September 16, 2026. This page replaces the old separate Discord, subreddit and communities pages.
Last verified Sep 16, 2026. Recheck target: monthly. The CSV holds all 20 entries.
A community makes the list when people working on real problems share useful work there: research, projects you can reproduce, real troubleshooting, informed product experience. Member counts, unofficial invite links and paid groups that exist to sell a course don't count.
Read the rules before you post. Join through the project's own invite page, not a link scraped from somewhere else. Reddit is better for answers you'll want to find again. Discord is better for conversation. Events are better for relationships.
LangChain doesn't have an official Discord. Its community page sends you to Slack and the forum. Don't go looking for an unofficial one.
Start with five
Open models, research, Hugging Face, Latent Space, and the AI Engineer events calendar. Add a community for one specific product only after these five have a job in your week.
Start here for running open models on your own machine: shrinking models to fit (quantization), local setup, hardware and new releases. Post your hardware and software details if you want a useful answer.
Papers, methods and research careers. Link the paper and say exactly which part of the method you're asking about.
The best general server: courses, open models, libraries and project channels. Join through Hugging Face's official invite.
Paper discussions, jobs and meetups for people shipping AI products. Join from the Latent Space community page.
Summit, World's Fair and local meetups still beat any online room for meeting people. Watch the talks on the AI Engineer channel afterward.
The directory
Bring context when you ask for help: your hardware and runtime for local models, the paper for research, the workflow file for ComfyUI, the exact error for product help. A screenshot can give you an idea for an experiment, but it isn't one.
Start here for running open models on your own machine: shrinking models to fit (quantization), local setup, hardware and new releases. Post your hardware and software details if you want a useful answer.
Papers, methods and research careers. Link the paper and say exactly which part of the method you're asking about.
Data, deployment, monitoring and governance for models in production. Ask people about their constraints, not just which product they use.
Claude workflows and Claude Code. Check what people report against Anthropic's docs and status page before you trust it.
Where users talk about an OpenAI launch. The official docs, not the threads, tell you what's available and how the API behaves.
Agent design and tools. Explain where your agent's job starts and stops and how you're testing it, or the replies won't help.
Foundations, courses and first projects. When you ask for advice, include your skills, your time and a concrete goal for the next eight weeks.
Open image models, LoRAs and workflows. A great-looking result isn't always one you can reproduce.
Node graphs and custom nodes for ComfyUI. When you ask for help, attach a stripped-down version of your workflow and the exact error.
The best general server: courses, open models, libraries and project channels. Join through Hugging Face's official invite.
Where people who contribute to open research talk. Join from EleutherAI's official site, not an invite someone scraped.
Paper discussions, jobs and meetups for people shipping AI products. Join from the Latent Space community page.
Anthropic's verified product community. Good for conversation, but go to Reddit and the docs for answers that stick around.
Live prompt talk for image work. Join through Midjourney's official help center, not a random invite.
Implementation help from the community around the official repo. Start at the repo, then follow the community link it gives you.
Framework help, starting from the official docs. Don't go hunting for unofficial Discords first.
The community links live in the official AutoGen repo, so start there when you're stuck.
W&B's official community page for help with experiments, jobs and implementation.
The official page links to Slack, help forums and events. Good for implementation questions and for finding other people building with LangChain.
Summit, World's Fair and local meetups still beat any online room for meeting people. Watch the talks on the AI Engineer channel afterward.
For product status, pricing, policy, outages or regulated advice, go to the official source first. Reddit and Discord are where you find things. Documentation, GitHub issues and status pages tell you what's true.
To find the original source behind a promising thread, use AI blogs and news sites. For accounts that post the paper or code itself, use AI X accounts.
Change log
Folded Discord, subreddits, and the old communities list into one hub. Paid classroom hangouts dropped. Join only through official pages.
Follow changes to every directory with the directory changes RSS feed.