Hi everyone —

Welcome to the very first Portland AI Devs newsletter. If you're getting this, you came out to a meetup or hackathon, or found us online — either way, glad you're here.

Quick intro: we're a community of developers in Portland who learn AI by actually building with it. We run meetups and hackathons (next one below), and this newsletter is the monthly companion — what happened in AI that was actually worth your attention, plus what's going on locally. It'll be short. Promise.

The big thing: good models got cheap, fast

The story of the season is the gap between frontier and budget models closing. New releases land almost weekly — OpenAI's GPT-6 line, Google's Gemini 4 Carbon, Moonshot's Kimi K3.1 Pro — while prices on the useful end keep falling. DeepSeek's V4.1 Flash runs about $30 per million input tokens; Claude Haiku 5.5 about $10. The model you'd actually ship in a side project now costs about a coffee a month to run. If price was your excuse for not building, it isn't anymore. (llm-stats)

Open inference is having a moment

IBM shipped llm-d 1.0 in October — an open-source engine for running LLM inference at production scale without the vendor bill. Between that and tools like vLLM, self-hosting inference stopped being a weird flex and started being a reasonable default for anything with real traffic. This is exactly the kind of thing we hack on together at meetups — bring a laptop to the next one and we'll get something running. (IBM)

Jobs

Hacker News' November "Who is hiring?" thread is live, with plenty of AI roles in it (thread). Industry reports put average AI-engineer pay somewhere north of $200k this year — with hiring loops getting longer and pickier, not shorter. Portland-specific listings are thin on the big boards, which honestly feels like an opportunity for this community. Hiring, or job-hunting? Reply to this email — we'll start featuring local roles in future issues.

Mark your calendar

Hack the Build — your hackathon A-team, Saturday, December 5 at the Portland Business Accelerator. Hands-on workshop putting Cursor Pro and Grok Bot to work as your build team. Free, beginner-friendly. Come build with us.

That's issue #1

One email a month, no hype, unsubscribe any time. Reply and tell us what you want more (or less) of — this thing gets better with your two cents.

— Varshith and the Portland AI Devs crew, Portland, OR

Questions, or just want to say hi? Reach us at [email protected] — and come check out the community at pdxaidevs.tech.