AI Engineer World's Fair Coverage
It has been less than three years since Shawn "swyx" Wang coined the term AI engineer in an open letter to the community, but this week thousands of engineers are converging on San Francisco for the now-annual AI Engineer World’s Fair.
As he put it, AI engineers don’t need doctorates and the ability to create LLMs. Rather, they do the important work of integrating machine learning capabilities into current software effectively. “When it comes to shipping AI products, you want engineers, not researchers,” he suggested.
While the latest AI models from the likes of Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google tend to grab the consumer press headlines, the task of integrating these new capabilities into workable, sellable software is arguably more important. And adding APIs without breaking the code is a profession that appeals to many software engineers.
The concept spawned a San Francisco summit, and in 2023 there were 500 software engineers discussing the ins and outs of using this relatively new technology, with many more attendee applications than there were places.
