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

**Alessio** (0:07)
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, Swix, founder of Small AI.

**Swyx** (0:17)
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.
So first, I want to welcome Ben Dunphy, who is my co-organizer on AI Engineer conferences.

**Ben Dunphy** (0:33)
Hey, hey, how's it going?

**Swyx** (0:35)
We have a very special guest. Anyone who's looking at the show notes and the title, we'll 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. But maybe something that we haven't actually recapped much on the pod is just the origin of the AI Engineer Summit, and 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.

**Ben Dunphy** (1:04)
Yeah, perhaps your listeners would like just a quick background on the summit. I mean, I'm sure many folks have heard of our events. We launched the AI Engineer Summit last June with your article 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. 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 this 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. 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. 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 stream.
In-person, we accepted about 400 attendees and had speakers, workshop instructors, and sponsors all congregating in San Francisco over two days, two and a half days with the welcome reception. It was quite the event to kick off this movement that's turning into quite an exciting industry.

**Swyx** (2:25)
The overall idea of this is that I kind of view AI engineering, at least all my work in the space and the other stuff as starting an industry. And I think every industry, every new community needs a place to congregate.
And I definitely think that AI engineer, or at least the conference is that it's meant to be the biggest gathering of technical engineering people working with AI. I think we kind of got that spot last year. It was a very competitive conference season, especially in San Francisco, but I think as far as I understand, in terms of cultural impact, online impacts, and the speakers that people want to see, we got them all.
And it was very important for us to be the vendor neutral type of event, right? The reason I partnered with Ben is that Ben has a lot of experience, a lot more experience doing vendor neutral stuff. I first met you when I was speaking at one of your events, and now we're sort of business partners on that. And yeah, I mean, I don't know if you have any sort of thoughts on making things vendor neutral, making things more of a community industry conference, rather than like something that's owned by one company.

**Ben Dunphy** (3:25)
Yeah, I mean, events that are owned by a company are great, but this is typically where you have product pitches and this smaller internet community. But if you want the truly internet community, if you want a more varied audience and, you know, frankly, better content for, especially for a technical audience, you want a vendor neutral event. And this is because when you have folks that are running the event that are focused on one thing and one thing alone, which is quality, quality of content, quality of speakers, quality of the in-person experience, and just of general relevance, it really elevates everything to the next level.
And when you have someone like yourself who's coming to this content curation, the role that you take at this event and bringing that neutrality with, along with your experience, that really helps to take it to the next level. And then when you have someone like myself focusing on just the program curation and the in-person experience, then both of our forces combined, we can really create this epic event. And so these vendor-neutral events, if you've been to a small community event, typically these are vendor-neutral.