TL;DR: You can now buy tickets, apply to speak, or join the expo for the biggest AI Engineer event of 2024. We’re gathering *everyone* you want to meet - see you this June.

In last year’s the Rise of the AI Engineer we put our money where our mouth was and announced the AI Engineer Summit, which fortunately went well:

With ~500 live attendees and over ~500k views online, the first iteration of the AI Engineer industry affair seemed to be well received. Competing in an expensive city with 3 other more established AI conferences in the fall calendar, we broke through in terms of in-person experience and online impact.

So at the end of Day 2 we announced our second event: the AI Engineer World’s Fair. The new website is now live, together with our new presenting sponsor:

We were delighted to invite both Ben Dunphy, co-organizer of the conference and Sam Schillace, the deputy CTO of Microsoft who wrote some of the first Laws of AI Engineering while working with early releases of GPT-4, on the pod to talk about the conference and how Microsoft is all-in on AI Engineering.

Rise of the Planet of the AI Engineer

Since the first AI Engineer piece, AI Engineering has exploded:

and the title has been adopted across OpenAI, Meta, IBM, and many, many other companies:

1 year on, it is clear that AI Engineering is not only in full swing, but is an emerging global industry that is successfully bridging the gap:

* between research and product,

* between general-purpose foundation models and in-context use-cases,

* and between the flashy weekend MVP (still great!) and the reliable, rigorously evaluated AI product deployed at massive scale, assisting hundreds of employees and driving millions in profit.

The greatly increased scope of the 2024 AI Engineer World’s Fair (more stages, more talks, more speakers, more attendees, more expo…) helps us reflect the growth of AI Engineering in three major dimensions:

* Global Representation: the 2023 Summit was a mostly-American affair. This year we plan to have speakers from top AI companies across five continents, and explore the vast diversity of approaches to AI across global contexts.

* Topic Coverage:

* In 2023, the Summit focused on the initial questions that the community wrestled with - LLM frameworks, RAG and Vector Databases, Code Copilots and AI Agents. Those are evergreen problems that just got deeper.

* This year the AI Engineering field has also embraced new core disciplines with more explicit focus on Multimodality, Evals and Ops, Open Source Models and GPU/Inference Hardware providers.

* Maturity/Production-readiness: Two new tracks are dedicated toward AI in the Enterprise, government, education, finance, and more highly regulated industries or AI deployed at larger scale:

* AI in the Fortune 500, covering at-scale production deployments of AI, and

* AI Leadership, a closed-door, side event for technical AI leaders to discuss engineering and product leadership challenges as VPs and Heads of AI in their respective orgs.

We hope you will join Microsoft and the rest of us as either speaker, exhibitor, or attendee, in San Francisco this June. Contact us with any enquiries that don’t fall into the categories mentioned below.

Show Notes

* Ben Dunphy

* 2023 Summit

* GitHub confirmed $100m ARR on stage

* History of World’s Fairs

* Sam Schillace

* Writely on Acquired.fm

* Early Lessons From GPT-4: The Schillace Laws

* Semantic Kernel

* Sam on Kevin Scott (Microsoft CTO)’s podcast in 2022

* AI Engineer World’s Fair (SF, Jun 25-27)

* Buy Super Early Bird tickets (Listeners can use LATENTSPACE for $100 off any ticket until April 8, or use GROUP if coming in 4 or more)

* Submit talks and workshops for Speaker CFPs (by April 8)

* Enquire about Expo Sponsorship (Asap.. selling fast)

Timestamps

* [00:00:16 ] Intro

* [00:01:04 ] 2023 AI Engineer Summit

* [00:03:11 ] Vendor Neutral

* [00:05:33 ] 2024 AIE World's Fair

* [00:07:34 ] AIE World's Fair: 9 Tracks

* [00:08:58 ] AIE World's Fair Keynotes

* [00:09:33 ] Introducing Sam

* [00:12:17 ] AI in 2020s vs the Cloud in 2000s

* [00:13:46 ] Syntax vs Semantics

* [00:14:22 ] Bill Gates vs GPT-4

* [00:16:28 ] Semantic Kernel and Schillace's Laws of AI Engineering

* [00:17:29 ] Orchestration: Break it into pieces

* [00:19:52 ] Prompt Engineering: Ask Smart to Get Smart

* [00:21:57 ] Think with the model, Plan with Code

* [00:23:12 ] Metacognition vs Stochasticity

* [00:24:43 ] Generating Synthetic Textbooks

* [00:26:24 ] Trade leverage for precision; use interaction to mitigate

* [00:27:18 ] Code is for syntax and process; models are for semantics and intent.

* [00:28:46 ] Hands on AI Leadership

* [00:33:18 ] Multimodality vs "Text is the universal wire protocol"

* [00:35:46 ] Azure OpenAI vs Microsoft Research vs Microsoft AI Division

* [00:39:40 ] On Satya

* [00:40:44 ] Sam at AI Leadership Track

* [00:42:05 ] Final Plug for Tickets & CFP

Transcript

[00:00:00 ] Alessio: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO in residence at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co host Swyx, founder of Small

[00:00:16 ] Intro

[00:00:16 ] swyx: AI. Hey, hey, we're back again with a very special episode, this time with two guests and talking about the very in person events rather than online stuff.

[00:00:27 ] swyx: So first I want to welcome Ben Dunphy, who is my co organizer on AI engineer conferences. Hey, hey, how's it going? We have a very special guest. Anyone who's looking at the show notes and the title will preview this later. But I guess we want to set the context. We are effectively doing promo for the upcoming AI Engineer World's Fair that's happening in June.

[00:00:49 ] swyx: But maybe something that we haven't actually recapped much on the pod is just the origin of the AI Engineer Summit and why, what happens and what went down. Ben, I don't know if you'd like to start with the raw numbers that people should have in mind.

[00:01:04 ] 2023 AI Engineer Summit

[00:01:04 ] Ben Dunphy: Yeah, perhaps your listeners would like just a quick background on the summit.

[00:01:09 ] Ben Dunphy: I mean, I'm sure many folks have heard of our events. You know, you launched, we launched the AI Engineer Summit last June with your, your article kind of coining the term that was on the tip of everyone's tongue, but curiously had not been actually coined, which is the term AI Engineer, which is now many people's, Job titles, you know, we're seeing a lot more people come to this event, with the job description of AI engineer, with the job title of AI engineer so, is an event that you and I really talked about since February of 2023, when we met at a hackathon you organized we were both excited by this movement and it hasn't really had a name yet.

[00:01:48 ] Ben Dunphy: We decided that an event was warranted and that's why we move forward with the AI Engineer Summit, which Ended up being a great success. You know, we had over 5, 000 people apply to attend in person. We had over 9, 000 folks attend, online with over 20, 000 on the live stre