6 Things to Know about AIE World's Fair 2026

Talk transcript

1. 0:00

   Six things to know about AI Engineer World's Fair. Hi, I'm swyx. If you didn't know, I'm one of the co-founders of AI Engineer, and there's, uh, 15 of us now working really hard day and night, even on weekends, to bring you the show.

2. 0:13

   We've been really, uh, overblown by how, uh, positive the response has been, especially for this World's Fair, and we figured we should pull some kind of update, uh, from people behind the scenes, but we didn't have a ton of budget to do it.

3. 0:29

   So this is me in my, uh, working place and, uh, doing all this in one shot. Uh, we d- we, you know, we don't have-- Like we're, we're busy producing the show, so we just wanted to give you an update, give you a guide.

4. 0:44

   If you're new, welcome. If you're, uh, an AIE veteran, there's a lot of new things that you should be aware of that we're trying out this year. That's why we're making this.

5. 0:53

   So, um, if you stick around, uh, I've been told for YouTube purposes, uh, I'm gonna tell you how we're gonna getting all these ex- uh, exclusive attendee perks, uh, featuring $38,000 in terms of, uh, sponsor offers, which I'm very excited about.

6. 1:08

   So stay tuned and hit sub... Um, the general vibe of this video is we wanna show you a little bit behind the scenes of what we're building. Um, and, uh, I figured, you know, like I think-- I like the number six.

7. 1:21

   Six is a good, like, well, not too many. Like there is a lot of stuff going on when you're organizing six people, but here are the big six things that you must...

8. 1:30

   Okay. Well, first thing, it's bigger than all the previous AIEs. I almost wanted to say it's all previous AIEs combined, but that's not exactly true, 'cause if you do the math, actually we're, we're a little bit over that.

9. 1:41

   Um, but a lot of it is-- I, I mean, size is one thing. I think size, um, there's such a thing as too large anyway, so size doesn't appeal to me or to a lot of other people.

10. 1:52

    Uh, but one thing, one thing it does do is offer us the space to give everyone a little bit of something. And really how-- The way I think about AIE is that it is a buffet of things that, uh, you might be interested in that we are curating for you, and one ticket, uh, basically covers your selection

11. 2:10

    of all these things. Um, so we've grown a lot over the last six, seven events that we've done, and also, uh, you may have seen the really successful Mia- uh, Melbourne, Miami, and Singapore event with Paris coming up and Chicago.

12. 2:27

    Um, we've also really grown a lot on YouTube. Um, I just-- It just shocks me to see the growth. Like we thought that AIE World's Fair 2024 was big, uh, and now we're roughly 10x the size as well just for Europe.

13. 2:40

    Uh, and we're expecting this to be the largest AIE that we've ever done. So, uh, we're really glad about the, all the support online. Uh, the way that I'm thinking about curating this is that we're bringing back some roughly about 50% topics that are evergreen and then throwing away the other 50% and completely, um, adding new, completely

14. 3:01

    new topics that are super relevant. Um, our top tracks are like Autoresearch, which didn't exist last, uh, last year. We've split out, um, the sort of GPUs track into inference and post-training and pre-training, uh, which is the data quality track.

15. 3:16

    And then we've also added Memory & Continual Learning. We've added Verticals. We'll, we'll talk about all those things, but basically the idea is that it's larger than ever before.

16. 3:26

    Uh, compared to last year, there's the, there's an actually a whole extra day of extra content. Um, I know a lot of you are planning to fly out on July 2nd.

17. 3:33

    Don't. Um, it's actually some of the best stuff that we have. Uh, so as far as I can convince you to stay on America's birthday, you should. All right.

18. 3:42

    Uh, part two is, uh, even the expo itself. Um, part of the dream with World's Fair actually is that the talks are kind of optional. Like, um, actually what you wanna do is the hallway track.

19. 3:54

    Actually, the whole point of a conference is to meet in person because everything's recorded anyway. Um, and you can spend the whole day. There's actually four expo stages for people just talking about, um, you know, all the stuff that they're shipping and, and launching and, and answering questions, and some of these are actually really popular, uh, on

20. 4:10

    YouTube. Obviously, like everything's recorded. Uh, I think obviously the interesting thing is like the stuff that you get off, right? Like, which is real, the real offer at AIEs.

21. 4:21

    Uh, but the-- To me, it's really insane that for the price of an Explore Explorer ticket, which is kind of like our cheapest, like, uh, entry level tier, um, you just get to just wander the, the floor.

22. 4:32

    Uh, that to me, that was always the vision of, uh, a World's Fair as compared to a summit. Um, the World's Fair itself, it's so compelling. The expo has everyone relevant, uh, that you just wander and you catch up on AI engineering for 2026.

23. 4:45

    It's a pretty good deal. Um, compared to last year, this is how it looks last year for 2025. Um, it is roughly 4X bigger. Uh, we've got a lot of entertainment, so it's not all just business, business, business.

24. 4:57

    Um, it is at Moscone West, which, um, we, you know, we've-- we're very familiar with now and, uh, we're really loving hosting the show there. Everything happens in that building.

25. 5:07

    Um, but we're really using the place really well, which I'm really liking. So, uh, we're starting to sort of name all these, uh, streets. Uh, one of the things that you might like seeing as an Easter egg is Attention Avenue, uh, Backdrop Boulevard, Context Crescent, and Diffusion Drive.

26. 5:21

    That's my baby. Uh, keep a lookout for the water stations as well. That's, that's also another really fun one, as well as a lot of the robots. Uh, we're starting to serve things that are not human in AIE as well.

27. 5:33

    Um, and also something I'm really proud of is all the great logos that we have, uh, which I, which I'm just saying, like it's really everyone at AI-- in AI engineering.

28. 5:41

    So if you wanna catch up, this is the spot.

29. 5:45

    Um, the other thing that I often talk about when, uh, like when sort of explaining like what is our trend of AI, AI engineering, um, it is that we want to be inclusive and we want to sort of grow the audience, uh, a little bit every, every single year.

30. 6:00

    And the relationship of industry and research is something that is increasingly important, I think. Um, in my podcast conversations with the labs and the researchers and all those things, actually, I think they are more fluid in their conception of research and engineering than, um, the people externally might feel.

31. 6:20

    Um, like when I had my conversation with Greg Brockman last year at the World's Fair, he was talking about how people just switch back and forth from research and engineering all the time, and I think that's definitely very true, and I think it should be true for us.

32. 6:32

    Like, we, uh, are setting ourselves up to be the industry counterpart of academic conferences in AI, like the ICML and like the NeurIPS. Um, and we have a real partnership with the ACM, which, um, this year set up the conference on the AI agentic systems, supported by these lovely people, uh, some of whom have been our speakers

33. 6:51

    and some of our future speakers as well. Um, but really what they've done is basically let us do an industry spotlight selection of some of the stuff that is relevant for you this year, some of whom are, are just, uh, speaking again.

34. 7:04

    Uh, if you haven't been to any of these academic conferences, they're really massive, like industry, uh, a- academics that are presentation markets. Uh, this is a photo of NeurIPS.

35. 7:14

    Not all of them are as big as this one. NeurIPS is 40 years old. But, um, [lip smack] really, like they're-- Uh, I think they're a way for someone who's spent a lot of time on something to present their work, and for you to serendipitously walk past and go, "What is that?"

36. 7:29

    And you find a lot of things. And, uh, I think a lot of my favorite NeurIPS experiences has been just discovering something I didn't know about from just walking past it.

37. 7:38

    And I think this is some-- is a very important thing for breaking through the algorithm because, um, I think the, the feed is, and the, and the recommendation systems, another topic we really care about, is really hyper-optimized to feeding you clickbait, feeding you 10 of the same thing that you liked one time, um, and, uh, not really

38. 7:57

    having much taste because the, the regression to the mean is super high. I think if you have a community that is curated, that is high effort, that is really sincerely, inherently, deeply involved in this topic, you get a very different feel, and I hope you get to experience it with our poster sessions.

39. 8:13

    Um, the other thing that we're trying is we're really trying to innovate on this 40-year paradigm of poster sessions, which are papers, which are, you know, six months out of date by the time they reach the floor, all those things.

40. 8:24

    And really, like I th-- uh, you know, a fundamental belief of mine is that there is something to learn not just from a paper that is published, although that is a very good artifact of work.

41. 8:34

    Um, there is, there's something to learn from a blog post, from a product, from a talk, and even a tweet. Um, and so we actually put out a call for posters, posters with an A.

42. 8:43

    Um, so if you like posting on Twitter, uh, and if you have a hot take, we're gonna print it out and we're gonna put it on the same level as a poster session with, with no A, and you're going to just defend your tweet.

43. 8:56

    Oh my God, where is that, uh, image that I prepared?

44. 9:02

    GPT image did not follow my instructions. I, I asked it to actually put an example of a kind of tweet that we would get, but the idea is that you would print out your tweet.

45. 9:10

    Um, GPT image fail. Tell me how to fix it, or actually tell Gabriel how to fix it, 'cause that's who we invited, uh, from OpenAI. Okay, um, part four.

46. 9:21

    Another very, very important constituency is the leadership, uh, the enterprises, the CTOs, the VPs of AI who are managing AI engineers, hiring, recruiting, setting up agentic organizations. Um, we have a few new initiatives.

47. 9:33

    We've had this sort of track for the last three years. We have this new-- a few new initiatives that I wanna go over. And, uh, the first of all is that the entire level three is basically reserved for the leadership track, which is about 50% of the floor space of the breakout space.

48. 9:50

    And here we're doing a lot of new stuff apart from just obviously content from fellow leaders and, you know, talking to them. Um, one of the largest concepts that has emerged over the last year is this concept of token billionaires.

49. 10:01

    Here's Ryan Lopopolo at AIE Europe talking about how he wants everyone to be token billionaires, and there's a lot of these. Uh, basically, if you spend something on the order of, uh, a billion tokens a month, that's actually a really low bar for some of these people.

50. 10:14

    Some of them spend 10 trillion a month. Um, in that order, you're-- you qualify for our Token Billionaire program, uh, which is basically a lounge, and think of it as like an Amex Platinum lounge or something, where you're just going to have a different kind of conversation for someone who uses it.

51. 10:32

    Um, some of this, they are going to be heavily LLM psychosis, as in I think there'll be about even split between people who are trying to spend more in smart ways and people who are trying to spend less, and it's gonna be a really interesting diversion.

52. 10:48

    Alex Volkov from Weights & Biases calls this the ZL spectrum after Mario Zechner.

53. 10:54

    Um, also a talk that is coming at World's Fair. And we also are introducing thematic focuses. We used to just have sort of undifferentiated, like you're a leader, you're an architect, we'll just slot you in with someone who's like something vaguely related.

54. 11:09

    Here we're-- To-- Uh, this year we're pursuing daily themes. The, the themes that people are asking me for is they wanna see real workflows from other people who are not selling them anything.

55. 11:19

    They are looking at token maxing, obviously the extremes and the, the, the sort of reductions as, as we talked about, as well as setting up AI factories for companies.

56. 11:27

    Um, and I think that also maps to like some of the networking that people wanna do. So we actually have two opportunities for off the record networking, uh, from the networking room that we're setting up, where you can book meetings with speakers and fellow attendees with a, with a new system that we're cooking, as well as McKenzie,

57. 11:44

    one of our top speakers from Code Summit, uh, this beautiful shirt. Um, McKenzie's just doing a session every day where you can just meet with them and talk off the record again with them about what's going on at your company and, uh, what they think about it.

58. 11:58

    Um, so they are working on a tokenomics thing, uh, working on agentic organization, and a third thing that we haven't announced.

59. 12:05

    Okay, so what's the fifth thing? Fifth thing is we're betting hard on AI verticals as opposed to horizontals of last year. So last year, for example, we added, uh, design engineering as a track and product management as a track.

60. 12:20

    Um, that's still very broad, and I think that's still relevant and, and worthwhile. But I think a lot of the big themes of this year is that AI is being deployed in these very high-value verticals.

61. 12:31

    Uh, so for this year, we've picked, uh, for deployed engineering, agentic commerce, healthcare, finance, and GTM. Um, this is partially inspired by Chris Lovejoy, who was one of our top speakers from a couple years now.

62. 12:44

    Um, and I really like this screen share that, uh, I've set up, so you watch it. So we have all these tracks, right? FDE, uh, agentic commerce, healthcare, and AI and GTM.

63. 12:55

    The special one that takes precedence above all of them is AI and finance, which is our big bet for New York. Um, so we are, uh, also gonna pre-announce AI Engineer New York.

64. 13:05

    Um, this is our third New York conference now, but our first entirely focused on finance. Um, we-- I think I come from a finance background. I used to be a sell-side trader and a buy-side hedge fund guy.

65. 13:17

    Um, and so I think, uh, if there was a vertical after code that is the most likely and closest to code for takeoff, it is finance, uh, closely followed by healthcare, law, FDE, GTM, all those things.

66. 13:30

    Um, so I think that's interesting and self-evident, but, um, this in itself, it's its own conference, like a collection of verticals and, um, understanding what they are.

67. 13:41

    And then finally, I think, um, to make the most use out of, uh, your time at World's Fair, there's a whole bunch of side events. Um, I should-- I intended to show you how to navigate the website.

68. 13:51

    Just go to ai.engineer/wf. Um, we have a LLMs MB that's, that has, uh, inputs into all the other guys. It's really fun. Um, but if you just click side events here, uh, you can see all the side events.

69. 14:05

    We have 41 listed as of time of recording. People keep adding stuff. Uh, but if you want to, you know, hang out with people outside and, um, continue the conversation after the, the, the main day of events, this is where you go.

70. 14:19

    A few side events I would highlight. Um, NEO is, uh... Sorry. Well, first of all, the ultimate side event, the World Cup, happening with us, now confirmed to be a Team USA event.

71. 14:30

    Very excited about it. Um, obviously, there's no single venue that will accommodate 6,000 people, but just join one of the things. Watch it with nerds and talk about AI.

72. 14:41

    Um, we're actually doing, after some feedback from AI Engineer Europe, we're actually doing our first NEO, New Engineer Orientation. Uh, this is literally for people who are coming on their own.

73. 14:51

    Uh, so usually World's Fair's kind of design is sort of come, go, go with your friends, go with your team, uh, divide and conquer. There's, you know, 10 to 12 simultaneous tracks, so you just split up with your team, pick like one per, one track per person, and then you gather it back at the end of the

74. 15:06

    day, sort of like a MapReduce of... Um, uh, for NEO, uh, if you're coming alone, you're completely new, or if you're just returning and you're open to networking and helping others out, uh, this is the, uh, orientation the night before the first day where people will just meet up.

75. 15:23

    Um, so far we have 300 people signed up. I think this is gonna go to 1,000 people, so we need help. Um, we're gonna have a lot of newbies.

76. 15:30

    A lot-- Everyone's gonna ask the same exact questions. We have a chatbot. No one's gonna use it. We know this, so we just... People wanna talk to humans, I know.

77. 15:38

    Um, so it's the, it's the irony of AI that, you know, even as much as we believe in like AI, we do still wanna talk to humans. That's why we're all here.

78. 15:46

    So we're setting up NEO. Um, also a new one, this one I had nothing to do with 'cause I don't have kids. Um, but the, the kind people at Neo4j have set up a kids event.

79. 15:56

    Like literally, if you have kids, bring your kid. This is not about how to be a better parent. This is bring your kid and get them interested. Um, I don't know the rules around this.

80. 16:06

    I, I'm-- They're doing it, but I just, I'm just highlighting it 'cause it's cool. Uh, I do think that we do wanna be supportive and inclusive and, um, you know, I guess one of our KPIs is like the amount of relationships that we're starting to fo- form for families and couples.

81. 16:21

    Um, there have been couples that have met at AIE and, you know, uh, that's, that's like one of the, my, my dearest sort of impact stories that, that I love and, and the team loves that's organizing this thing.

82. 16:31

    We do have a dating event, uh, that is in the expo on opening night. It's not even listed. We just don't have the space. Just, just come. Just come for everything, okay?

83. 16:39

    Like, I just don't have the bandwidth or capacity. I'm making this video, okay? I'm like taking time out from like messing around with my schedule and like doing migrations on the database.

84. 16:48

    Just come, okay? Yeah. Anyway, so that's the recap. Uh, six things to know about AIE. Um, there's a lot. These are the six things that me, the, you know, co-founder chooses.

85. 17:00

    I'm sure there's stuff I missed. Um, there's MCs I'm really proud of. There's track hosts I'm really happy to work with. Uh, it is a village. I cannot take credit for how well AIE, AIE has gone.

86. 17:12

    People have just decided to pitch in and make this community meaningful because there's so much slop out there, and we're still on the war on slop. We're still fighting slop.

87. 17:20

    What everything I said in New York last time, if you saw my last talk, still stands. So we're doing this. Join us. Um, there's a promo in here if you need the, the sort of discount.

88. 17:32

    Don't really need it. It's quite affordable. Um, and you get your money back in credits anyway, so, uh, what's there to lose? Come spend some time with us. Don't travel outside of the US for, uh, the week of July 2nd.

89. 17:47

    See ya.