Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
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.
00:25:20 · S1, Shawn Wang
[00:25:20] S1: Oh, are you actually creating a CLI based on [00:25:22] S0: Every everything is is MCP. MCP. But... Yeah. Everything has been transcribed. It's available as a dataset. If wanna train your LLM on it... Yeah. Go ahead. [00:25:31] S1: Have you published yet? [00:25:32] S0: Or Yeah. It's it's on ai.engineer/data [00:25:35] S1: Oh, nice. [00:25:36] S0: I'll check it out. Also, yeah, shows the l... Shows the MCP and the datasets that you can download. It just depends how you wanna consume it. You know, we transcribe everything. We also deep research every speaker and every organization. So whoever has ever spoken at AIE, you'll you'll have a profile, and we'll basically try to make the Wikipedia of AI. [00:25:54] S1: Nice. And just one last question to follow-up with the AIE is that when did you actually bring the AIE or to global, like, different markets? I know Yeah. Now this year, we have Singapore, but I think a few years ago Yeah. [00:26:07] S0: Paris is the first one. [00:26:08] S1: Paris is the first one. So how did... How was that journey end?
00:26:10 · Shawn Wang
[00:26:10] S0: Mostly, that is basically exactly following the JSConf model. JSConf is the number one JSConf. Yeah. And it's a very simple model. Right? Like, I will never reach every country in the world, but every country in the world will probably wanna do some AI. So, obviously, their country deserves to have a leading conference. They can either make their own or they can borrow our brand and our YouTube channel and our social media. So, basically, we just set up a partnership program. Paris was the first to apply. Okay. A very fun fact, the organizers of AIE Paris got acquired into Mistral. Oh. So now now it's run by, you know, Francis, and Europe's leading AI lab is Yeah. Runs AIE Paris, which is very cool. Like, I want that for every single, you know, country to, like... Yeah. You you have AIE India. You have AIE Japan. Right. Yeah. So I'm I'm working with all those those companies now, and it's very cool. Like, I will never know that region as much as them, but, like, they... Do they deserve a good conference? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And then they can do business and and hire people and all that all that stuff. Right? Yeah. The the world is very big, we we follow that model. So, basically, it's the idea that you have... There's there's three things. Right? Like, one, you agree to not abuse the brand name and, like, well, you know, we have some sort of, like, revenue share thing. Two, you're publishing out everything that you're you're you're doing. And then three, you have a code of conduct where, like, if, you know, if someone is being abused or mistreated, there's some way of of resolving that. I think that's mostly an an ethical thing rather than anything else. So we take a lot of risk by doing this because we're sharing our brand with people that we don't work with. And so what if they throw a bad AIE? No. So far, it hasn't happened. And so far Yeah. Because I think, like, mostly we're careful we're about who we wanna work with, but then also the the kind of people that are drawn to us anyway are pretty enthusiastic and organically interested in, like... Yeah. Especially for Singapore. AIE Singapore. Yeah. First of all, I'm Singaporean, but that actually did not matter at all. The current top conference in Singapore that is an AI conference is actually a crypto conference.