- Step 5 of 10 in the "Keep up with AI" reading list
Best AI communities
Zarif
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 September 16, 2026. Recheck target: monthly. Download CSV (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.
- r/LocalLLaMA (r/LocalLLaMA) · Continuous
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.
- r/MachineLearning (r/MachineLearning) · Continuous
Papers, methods and research careers. Link the paper and say exactly which part of the method you're asking about.
- Hugging Face Discord · Real-time
The best general server: courses, open models, libraries and project channels. Join through Hugging Face's official invite.
- Latent Space Discord · Real-time
Paper discussions, jobs and meetups for people shipping AI products. Join from the Latent Space community page.
- AI Engineer events · Around the conference calendar
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.
Scroll horizontally to compare the columns.
| Name | Role | Why it is here | Cadence |
|---|---|---|---|
| r/LocalLLaMA r/LocalLLaMA | Reddit · open models | 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. | Continuous |
| r/MachineLearning r/MachineLearning | Reddit · research | Papers, methods and research careers. Link the paper and say exactly which part of the method you're asking about. | Continuous |
| r/MLOps r/MLOps | Reddit · production | Data, deployment, monitoring and governance for models in production. Ask people about their constraints, not just which product they use. | Continuous |
| r/ClaudeAI r/ClaudeAI | Reddit · product | Claude workflows and Claude Code. Check what people report against Anthropic's docs and status page before you trust it. | Continuous |
| r/OpenAI r/OpenAI | Reddit · product | Where users talk about an OpenAI launch. The official docs, not the threads, tell you what's available and how the API behaves. | Continuous |
| r/aiagents r/aiagents | Reddit · agents | 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. | Continuous |
| r/learnmachinelearning r/learnmachinelearning | Reddit · beginners | Foundations, courses and first projects. When you ask for advice, include your skills, your time and a concrete goal for the next eight weeks. | Continuous |
| r/StableDiffusion r/StableDiffusion | Reddit · image models | Open image models, LoRAs and workflows. A great-looking result isn't always one you can reproduce. | Continuous |
| r/comfyui r/comfyui | Reddit · ComfyUI | Node graphs and custom nodes for ComfyUI. When you ask for help, attach a stripped-down version of your workflow and the exact error. | Continuous |
| Hugging Face Discord | Discord · builders | The best general server: courses, open models, libraries and project channels. Join through Hugging Face's official invite. | Real-time |
| EleutherAI | Discord · open research | Where people who contribute to open research talk. Join from EleutherAI's official site, not an invite someone scraped. | Real-time |
| Latent Space Discord | Discord · AI engineers | Paper discussions, jobs and meetups for people shipping AI products. Join from the Latent Space community page. | Real-time |
| Claude Discord | Discord · product | Anthropic's verified product community. Good for conversation, but go to Reddit and the docs for answers that stick around. | Real-time |
| Midjourney | Discord · image creation | Live prompt talk for image work. Join through Midjourney's official help center, not a random invite. | Real-time |
| ComfyUI | Discord · ComfyUI | Implementation help from the community around the official repo. Start at the repo, then follow the community link it gives you. | Real-time |
| CrewAI | Product community | Framework help, starting from the official docs. Don't go hunting for unofficial Discords first. | When you are stuck on CrewAI |
| AutoGen | Product community | The community links live in the official AutoGen repo, so start there when you're stuck. | When you are stuck on AutoGen |
| Weights & Biases | Product community | W&B's official community page for help with experiments, jobs and implementation. | When you are stuck on W&B |
| LangChain community | Product community | The official page links to Slack, help forums and events. Good for implementation questions and for finding other people building with LangChain. | When you are stuck on LangChain |
| AI Engineer events | In person | Summit, World's Fair and local meetups still beat any online room for meeting people. Watch the talks on the AI Engineer channel afterward. | Around the conference calendar |
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.
