Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
00:18:00 · S1
[00:18:00] S1: Yeah. And to follow-up just to my interest as well. So I know that there are just a lot of works or to do, all right, as an AI engineer. I know you mentioned harness, a of developments happen in the AI. So do you think the role of the world AI engineer has been evolved as well, or is different from what you just mentioned, like three years ago, once you started this
00:18:24 · Shawn Wang
[00:18:24] S0: work? Honestly, it hasn't really changed that much. I think that what's hot within AI Engineering has changed, but the job title is pretty much correct. I think there are people... In the early days, it used to be RAG and managing context and all that. And then more recently, it's been coding agents, it's been harness engineering. It's been maybe loop engineering or whatever. Yeah. There's also other disciplines on memory and all these things. So for those who are interested in all the fields of AI engineering, in AIE World's Fair, which is the the the flagship biggest conference, we have 30 different tracks of what it means to be an AI engineer, and evals is part of that. Multimodal is part of it, you know, all that stuff. So I think it has shifted over time. I think agent engineer maybe is is one of them or AI architect, you know, so AI engineers, like, the individual contributor version of this, but who is, like, the company level, company wide boss, and AI architect is... Seems to be the emerging term for for that that person that decides this is how everybody in the company does AI. Yeah. That's AI architect. So... And then, like, there's there's all the all the other, like, AI designer, AI PM, all these things. So it's just, like, who does that work and who writes code and who is responsible for checking that code? If if something fails, are you responsible? No. You're not an AI engineer. Right. You know, if the the person who wakes up in, 4AM in the morning to go and fix it, that's the engineer. Yeah. Right? And so we wanna serve those people, and that's the real core of it. The other problem with AI is that there's a lot of bullshit. There's a lot of talking heads who have never coded a single day in their lives, but they are very big picture. They're very, very senior. They're like, oh, I'm CTO, blah blah blah. And... But they haven't... They don't touch code. Mhmm. And so a lot of AI conferences and communities focus on those guys because they have big fancy titles, but then they all sound the same. They're all like, oh, my timeline to AGI is, like, two years away. You know, all of you are gonna have... Not gonna have jobs in the future. You need to prepare for what's next. Conveniently, whatever is next looks like their job. So it's very self serving.
00:20:36 · Shawn Wang, S1
And I think that that's one of the reasons that AI Engineer works is that we try to focus on the lower level engineer that usually doesn't get the spotlight, that actually did the work, and is able to talk about all the war stories and share with their fellow engineers about what they're doing. And so I borrowed this idea from other parts, other conferences I've seen in my career, like GDC and KubeCon and JSConf and PyCon and all these other conferences that I've spoken at, where basically it is engineer to engineer, and they are the decision makers for the tech stack, And they are the people who create and innovate the new things, and they're not necessarily the most famous person, but they are definitely correct when it comes to the engineering. There's no bullshit. Right? And I think there's a lot of bullshit in the other things. [00:21:25] S1: Yeah. Yeah. You know, and that comes to the the first AIE Summit that you had organizing, like, three years ago, and then now it's actually a three day full summit with over 7,000 people who joined this year, just just for the audience who are not that familiar with what this event is and different kinds of content stat or workshops or the topics you actually, an AI engineer is caring about. And then how did you actually bring this, like, small event to this such a big event this year?
00:21:56 · Shawn Wang
[00:21:56] S0: AIE World's Fair is basically a similar industry flagship conference similar to the ones that every other industry already has. So gaming has GDC, 30,000 people in San Francisco. Security has two. Security has RSA. Security has Black Hat. If you're in the cybersecurity field, you go to one of those things. Yeah. And that's that's where you learn. I I really like the gaming one because gaming is very similar to labs. You have AAA studios, They work on the hardest games in the world, and it is extreme engineering, and they're all top secret. They don't do anything else. But one time a year, they come to GDC, and they will share, like, this is how I did game of the year. And that's the only way. If you're trying to be a game developer and you wanna work at a AAA game studio, that's the only way you learn. Yeah. So I think that now the model labs are similar to game studios. They have a lot of money. They're working on very, very big major projects. There's a lot of smaller companies that are, you know, trying to compete with them, but the labs are the important ones. And you want to learn from the labs, and where are you gonna learn from them? You know, they they do, like, very small conferences where they, like, they launch, like, Developer Day for OpenAI or Code with Claude for Anthropic, but those are super small and, like, very selective and mostly for customers, and they're not for engineers Mhmm. Talking to other engineers. And then there's, like, 50 other labs that are not open air and topic that also have something interesting. Right? So they... Usually, industry needs one big... Like, everyone comes here, and then you just walk around the room and just talk to everybody. Mhmm. And then they can talk to each other Yeah. Which is very interesting because... Especially for Chinese labs, of whom are on the entity list. Is this something that you guys talk about?
00:23:38 · S1
[00:23:38] S1: Yes.
00:23:38 · Shawn Wang
[00:23:38] S0: They cannot officially take meetings with you. Yes. A lot of American companies cannot officially take meetings with you. They're not allowed. They don't even respond to you. It's not because they don't want to. It's not because they're assholes. Mhmm. They're not allowed. But if you're in the same location, you run into each other. Right. And I think that's that's kind of interesting as for me to create opportunities for for magic to happen. And it's like people get hired, people find a cofounder. I have one couple that started dating, and now they... You know, they're they're basically married. And, like Wow. Yeah. That that is my number one KPI, number of number of marriages and babies that I've created. And so so I I I really like that. I I think that we can create that kind of high quality community. And, you know, we... We're aiming for 6,000 people this year. We managed to hit 7,000 plus. 1,500,000 online watched our talks. So there are people who cannot afford to come, don't live in San Francisco, don't live in The US, they can still watch Right. Our videos and catch up on all the content. We publish every single talk, every single workshop. And like I said, it's, like, 30 different tracks. There's too many tracks to name, but you can see on the website. But I I basically think that I really try to focus on things that are working, that you can make money. There are clear role models for you. Like, if you're trying to learn this field or you're a startup trying to build something, there's somebody who has probably talked about your thing at AIE. Right. That becomes a very valuable resource for anyone looking up anything. So another thing I've actually recently done that I haven't really been super public about is I transcribe everything and I catalog everything, so you don't even have to watch the talks. You can just take all of our website and feed it into an LLM, and then you can teach you whatever.