6 Things to Know about AIE World's Fair 2026

SPEAKER_00

Six things to know about AI Engineer World's Fair. Hi, I'm Swix. If you didn't know, I'm one of the co-founders of AI Engineer, and there's 15 of us now working really hard day and night, even on weekends, to bring you the show. We've been really overwhelmed by how positive the response has been, especially for this World's Fair. And we figured we should post some kind of update from people behind the scenes, but we didn't have a ton of budget to do it. So this is me in my working place doing all this in one shot. We're busy producing the show, so we just wanted to give you an update and a guide. If you're new, welcome.

SPEAKER_00

If you're 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. So if you stick around, I've been told for YouTube purposes, I'm going to tell you how we're getting all these exclusive attendee perks featuring $38,000 in sponsor offers, which I'm very excited about. So stay tuned and hit subscribe. The general vibe of this video is we want to show you a little bit behind the scenes of what we're building. And I figured the number six is good. Not too many. There is a lot of stuff going on when you're organizing people, but here are the big six things that you might want to know.

SPEAKER_00

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 because if you do the math, actually we're a little bit over that. But size is one thing. There's such a thing as too large anyway. So size doesn't appeal to me or to a lot of other people, but one thing it does do is offer us the space to give everyone a little bit of something. And really, the way I think about AIE is that it is a buffet of things that you might be interested in that we are curating for you. And one ticket basically covers your selection of all these things.

SPEAKER_00

So we've grown a lot over the last six or seven events that we've done. And also, you may have seen the really successful Melbourne, Miami, and Singapore events with Paris coming up. We've also really grown a lot on YouTube. It just shocks me to see the growth. We thought that AIE World's Fair 2024 was big, and now we're roughly 10x the size for Europe. And we're expecting the largest AIE that we've ever seen. So we're really glad about all the support online. The way that I'm thinking about curating this is that we're bringing back roughly 50% evergreen topics and then throwing away the other 50% and completely adding new topics that are super relevant.

SPEAKER_00

Our top tracks are auto-research. That didn't exist last year. We've split out the GPUs track into inference, post-training, and pre-training, which is the data quality track. And then we've also added memory and continual learning. We've added verticals. We'll talk about all those things, but the idea is that it's larger than ever before. Compared to last year, there's actually a whole extra day of content. I know a lot of you are planning to fly out on July 2nd. Don't. It's actually some of the best stuff that we have. So as far as I can convince you to stay on America's birthday, you should. All right, part two is the expo itself.

SPEAKER_00

Part of the dream with a World's Fair is that the talks are optional. What you want to do is the hallway track. The whole point of a conference is to meet in person because everything's recorded anyway. And you can spend the whole day. There's actually four expo stages for people just talking about all the stuff that they're shipping and launching and answering questions. And some of these are actually really popular on YouTube. Everything's recorded. The interesting thing is the stuff that you get off the record, which is the real alpha.

SPEAKER_00

But to me, it's really insane that for the price of an Explorer ticket, which is our cheapest entry-level tier, you just get to wander the floor. That, to me, was always the vision of a World's Fair as compared to a summit. The World's Fair itself is so compelling. The expo has everyone relevant that you just wander and you catch up on AI engineering for 2026. It's a pretty good deal. Compared to last year, it looks like this for 2025. It is roughly 4x bigger. We've got a lot of entertainment, so it's not all just business, business, business. It is at Moscone West, which we're very familiar with now. And we're really loving hosting the show there.

SPEAKER_00

Everything happens in that building, and we're really using this place well, which I'm really liking. So we're starting to name all these streets. One of the things that you might enjoy seeing as an Easter egg is Attention Avenue, Backdrop Boulevard, Context Crescent, and Diffusion Drive. That's my baby. Keep a lookout for the water stations as well. That's another really fun one. As well as a lot of the robots. We're starting to serve things that are not human at AIE as well. And something I'm really proud of is all the great logos that we have, which represent everyone in AI engineering. So if you want to catch up, this is the spot.

SPEAKER_00

The other thing that I often talk about when explaining what is our trend of AI engineering is that we want to be inclusive and want to grow the audience a little bit every single year. And the relationship of industry and research is something that is increasingly important, I think. As well as a lot of the robots. We're starting to serve things that are not human at AIE as well. And also, something I'm really proud of is all the great logos that we have, which I'm just saying, it's really everyone in AI engineering. So if you want to catch up, this is the spot.

SPEAKER_00

The other thing that I often talk about when explaining what is our trend of AI engineering, it is that we want to be inclusive and want to grow the audience a little bit every single year. And the relationship of industry and research is something that is increasingly important, I think. 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 the people externally might feel. 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.

SPEAKER_00

And I think that's definitely very true. And I think it should be true for us. We are setting ourselves up to be the industry counterpart of academic conferences in AI, like the ICML and like the NeurIPS. And we have a real partnership with the ACM, which this year set up the Conference on the AI Agentex Systems, supported by these lovely people, some of whom have been off-speakers and some of our speakers as well. But really what they've done is let us do an industry spotlight selection. Some of the stuff that is relevant for you this year, some of whom are just speaking again.

SPEAKER_00

If you haven't been to any of these academic conferences, they're really massive industry, academic presentation markets. This is a photo of NeurIPS. Not all of them are as big as this one. NeurIPS is 40 years old. But really, 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? And you find a lot of things. And I think a lot of my favorite NeurIPS experiences has been just discovering something I didn't know about from just walking past it. And I think this is a very important thing for breaking through the algorithm.

SPEAKER_00

Because I think the feed 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, and not really having much taste because 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.

SPEAKER_00

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 six months out of date by the time they reach the floor, all those things. And really, 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. There's something to learn from a blog post, from a product, from a talk, and even a tweet. And so we actually put out a call for posters, posters in A. So if you like posting on Twitter, and if you have a hot take, we're going to print it out.

SPEAKER_00

We're going to put it on the same level as a poster session with no A. And you're going to just defend your tweet. Oh, my God, where is that image that I prepared? GPT image did not follow my instructions. 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. GPT image fail, tell me how to fix it. Or actually, tell Gabriel how to fix it, because that's who we invited from OpenAI. Okay, part four. Another very, very important constituency is the leadership. The enterprises, the CTOs, the VPs of AI who are managing AI engineers, hiring, recruiting, setting up agentic organizations.

SPEAKER_00

We have a few new initiatives. We've had this sort of track for the last three years. We have a few new initiatives that I want to go over. And the first of all is that the entire level three is basically reserved for the leadership track, which is 50% of the floor space of the breakout space. And here we're doing a lot of new stuff, apart from just obviously content from fellow leaders and talking to them. One of the largest concepts that has emerged over the last year is this concept of token billionaires. Here's Ryan LePablo at AI Europe talking about how he wants everyone to be token billionaires. And there's a lot of these.

SPEAKER_00

Basically, if you spend something on the order of a billion tokens a month, that's actually a really low bar for some of these people. Some of them spend 10 trillion a month. In that order, you qualify for our token billionaire program, which is basically a lounge. Think of it as like an Amex Platinum lounge or something where you're just going to have a different kind of car for someone who uses it. Some of this, they are going to be heavily LLM psychosis. As in, I think there will 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 going to be a really interesting diversion.

SPEAKER_00

Alex Volkov from Weights and Biases calls this the ZL spectrum after Mario Zechner. Also a talk that is coming in. It's fair. And we also are introducing thematic focuses. We used to just have undifferentiated, you're a leader, you're an architect. We'll just slot you in with someone who's something vaguely related. This year, we're pursuing daily themes. The themes that people are asking me for is they want to see real workflows from other people who are not selling them anything. They are looking at token maxing, obviously the extremes and the reductions, as we talked about, as well as setting up EF factories for companies.

SPEAKER_00

And I think that also maps to some of the networking that people want to do. So we actually have two opportunities for off-the-record networking. From the networking room that we're setting up, where you can book meetings with speakers and fellow attendees with a new system that we're cooking. As well as McKinsey, one of our top speakers from CodeSummit, this beautiful shirt. McKinsey is 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 in your company and what they think about it.

SPEAKER_00

So they're working on a tokenomics thing, working in a genetic organization, and a third thing that we haven't announced. Okay. So what's the fifth thing? So we actually have two opportunities for off-the-record networking. From the networking room that we're setting up, where you can book meetings with speakers and fellow attendees with a new system that we're developing. As well as McKinsey, one of our top speakers from CodeSummit, this beautiful shirt. McKinsey is doing a session every day where you can meet with them and talk off-the-record with them about what's going on in your company and what they think about it.

SPEAKER_00

So they're working on a tokenomics thing, working in a genetic organization, and a third thing that we haven't announced. 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 design engineering as a track and product management as a track. That's still very broad, and I think that's still relevant 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. So for this year, we've picked forward-deployed engineering, Ingenic Commerce, healthcare, finance, and GTM.

SPEAKER_00

This is partially inspired by Chris Lovejoy, who was one of our top speakers from a couple years ago. And I really like this screen share that I've set up. So we have all these tracks, right? FDE, agency commerce, healthcare, and AI and GTM. The special one that takes precedence above all of them is AI and finance, which is our big bet for New York. So we are also going to pre-announce AI Engineer New York. This is our third New York conference now, but our first entirely focused on finance. I think I come from a finance background. I used to be a sell-side trader and a buy-side hedge fund guy.

SPEAKER_00

And so I think if there was a vertical after code that is the most likely and closest for takeoff, it is finance, closely followed by healthcare, law, FDE, GTM, all those things. So I think that's interesting and self-evident, but this in itself is its own car. It's a collection of verticals and understanding what they are. And then finally, I think, to make the most use out of your time at World's Fair, there's a whole bunch of side events. I intended to show you how to navigate the website. Just go to ai.engineer.com. We have an LLM that has inputs into all the other guys. It's really fun. But if you just click side events here, you can see all the side events.

SPEAKER_00

We have 41 listed as of time of recording. People keep adding stuff. But if you want to hang out with people outside and continue a conversation after the main day of events, this is where you go. A few side events I would highlight. NEO is, well, first of all, the ultimate side event, the World Cup, happening with us, now confirmed to be a Team USA event. Very excited about it. 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. We're actually doing, after some feedback from the Engineer Europe, our first NEO, New Engineering Organization.

SPEAKER_00

This is literally for people who are coming on their own. So usually, World's Fair's design is, go with your friends, go with your team, divide and conquer. There's 10 to 12 simultaneous tracks, so you just split up with your team, pick one track per person, and then you gather it back at the end of the day. For NEO, 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, this is the orientation the night before the first day where people will just meet up. So far, we have 300 people signed up. I think this is going to go to 1,000 people. So we need help. We're going to have a lot of newbies.

SPEAKER_00

Everyone's going to ask the same exact questions. We have a chatbot. No one's going to use it. We know this. Yes, so we just, people want to talk to humans. I know. So it's the irony of AI that even as much as we believe and AI, we do still want to talk to humans. That's why we're all here. So we're setting up NEO. Also a new one, this one, I had nothing to do with it because I don't have kids. But the kind of people in NEO4J have set up a kids event. 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. I don't know the rules around this.

SPEAKER_00

I'm there doing it, but I'm just highlighting it because it's cool. I do think that we do want to be supportive and inclusive. And I guess one of our KPIs is the amount of relationships that we're starting to form for families and couples. There have been couples that have met at AIE. And that's one of my dearest impact stories that I love and the team loves that's organizing this thing. We do have a dating event that is in the Expo on opening night. It's not even listed. I just don't have the space. Just come. Just come for everything. Okay. I just don't have the bandwidth or capacity. I'm making this video. Okay.

SPEAKER_00

I'm taking time out from messing around with my schedule and doing migrations in the database. Just come. Okay. Yeah. Anyway, so that's the recap. Six things to know about AIE. There's a lot.

SPEAKER_00

These are the six things that me, the co-founder, chooses. I'm sure there's stuff I missed. There's MCs I'm really proud of. There's Trackhost I'm really happy to work with. It is a village. I cannot take credit for how well AIE has gone. 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. Everything I said in New York last time, if you saw my last talk, still stands. So we're doing this. Join us. There's a promo in here if you need the discounts. There's MCs I'm really proud of. There's Trackhost I'm really happy to work with. It is a village.

SPEAKER_00

I cannot take credit for how well AIE has gone. 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. Everything I said in New York last time, if you saw my last talk, still stands. So we're doing this. Join us. There's a promo in here if you need discounts. Don't really need it. It's quite affordable. And you get your money back in credits anyway. So what's there to lose? Come spend some time with us. Don't travel outside of the U.S. for the week of July 2nd. See ya. Like, I just don't have the bandwidth or capacity. I'm making this video. Okay.

SPEAKER_00

I'm like taking time out from like messing around with my schedule and like doing migrations in the database. Just come. Okay. Yeah. Anyway, so that's the recap. Six things to know about AIE. There's a lot. These are the six things that me, the, you know, co-founder chooses. I'm sure there's stuff I missed. There's MCs I'm really proud of. There's Trackhost I'm really happy to work with. It is a village. I cannot take credit for how well AIE has gone. 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.

SPEAKER_00

Everything I said in New York last time, if you saw my last talk, still stands. So we're doing this. Join us. There's a promo in here if you need the sort of discounts. Don't really need it. It's quite affordable. And you get your money back in credits anyway. So what's there to lose? Come spend some time with us. Don't travel outside of the U.S. for the week of July 2nd. See ya.