Recap - AI Engineer World's Fair 2024
Curious to know what it's like to attend the biggest AI Engineer Conference in San Francisco? Read on to learn more about my time at the AI Engineer's World's Fair 2024.
Everyone is going crazy about Generative AI. Are you not?
I admit - I’m not immune to the craze either. That’s why I decided to attend the biggest conference for AI Engineers in San Francisco to learn more about this space.
One month ago, I went to the AI Engineer World’s Fair conference in San Francisco.
It was a blast. Not only did I get to visit the epicentre of tech in the USA, but and I also got to step into the eye of the AI typhoon!
I’m still trying to process everything that I came across, and you will have to excuse my short context window for not being able to deliver everything in a single post.
But please stay with me as I recount this journey.
First let’s start with some of the immediate takeaways I have from this conference:
The GenAI hype is real
The hype is still real, yet we are sobering up as an industry and realising that we need to invest more in robust engineering and “ops” practices in order to build more reliable applications.
So, good AI Engineering requires good software/ML engineering practices too.
And yes, this means embracing evals and doing more LLMOps in general too.
RAG is still an unsolved problem
RAG is still an active area of research and experimentation.
There were dozens of talks on the topic, ranging from Agentic RAG to Graph RAG, etc.
I just have a couple of toy RAG projects under my belt so I am not an expert in this area, but it seems to me that even prior to retrieval we still haven’t solved the data chunking process yet. And of course the embedding/vectorisation step is also seeing a lot of interest.
Finally, remember that knowing about your data and predicting the type of questions that will be asked on it can give your applications a serious unfair advantage and deliver a great user experience.
AI coding assistants for 100x engineers
I am convinced that a good software engineer with mastery of AI coding tools like Cursor can become a 10x/100x+ engineer in the near future.
That’s probably why I see talk on Twitter about the potential advent of the $1B dollar one-man company. I’m not sure we will ever get there, but at least I am a firm believer that savvy AI augmented software engineers will be able to write full blown application that took a whole team to create before.
The software/AI engineer of tomorrow is one whose capabilities are augmented to superhuman level - just like Tony Stark wearing his Iron Man suit.
Pace of progress is dizzying
Everything is moving too fast - it’s extremely hard to keep up with everything.
In fact I don’t think it is possible. That’s why I recommend you focus on a couple of areas, but remain curious about some of the other things that happen at the periphery too.
For me the areas of focus are AI Agents and RAG. But I am keeping an eye on the Open Source LLM space too.
We are still early
Lots of hype. Yet we are so very early…
It feels we are still at the start of an exponential era. We’re still struggling to get AI Agents to work reliably (especially for enterprise use cases).
Moreover, teams are finding it hard to build compelling GenAI products beyond the MVP/demo stage.
This is a great opportunity to bring meaningful contributions that move the industry forward.
My AI Tribe is growing
I met and connected with amazing people, curious and eager to learn and leverage GenAI for fun and profit.
I want to make sure we remain connected, collectively excited about the potential of this technology, and united in our desire to build better products that augment professionals’ workflows and improve societies.
San Francisco is great, but…
San Francisco is a city of paradox.
I lived in the future as I got into a Waymo self-driving car which safely drove me back to my hotel in the Marina District. I also ventured in areas afflicted by overwhelming homelessness and sickenening drug abuse.
I still find it all hard to compute, but this weird city still feels like the capital of the current tech and AI Renaissance.
The high energy that emanates from the people and events covering this technology in undeniable. And it is highly contagious too.
After coming back from such an inspiring trip, I just want to keep grinding and building the future, with greater intensity!
The road ahead for me
I am smitten with SF after this maiden voyage to California.
I will certainly come back.
In the meantime, I am going to do my part in London and Europe - keep connecting with interesting people, sharing my learnings, and building the AI-infused future I envision.
Stay tuned 🎬!
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