Presenting the AI Engineer World's Fair — with Sam Schillace, Deputy CTO of Microsoft

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 t