Welcome to the first edition of the AI Engineer World’s Fair newspaper!
On behalf of the organizing team, I’m delighted to welcome you to AI Engineer World’s Fair 2026, and to thank MLH and DEV for helping make this newspaper possible.
There are multiple personal full-circle moments here for me.
Ten years ago, at a conference very much like this one, I began my developer writing career on DEV because of a writing challenge they inspired. My first blog post was about a conference talk: what I heard, what I learned, and what I wanted to remember. That habit of writing in public has shaped my career, my learning, my friendships, my opportunities, and, in a very real way, my life. So my first encouragement to you is simple: Write things down. Share what you learned, restate things in your own words, construct new insights by contrast and comparison. Not only because it helps your public profile, though it does, but because reflection is good for the soul (and changing the trajectory of your career).
Three years ago today, I wrote down “The Rise of the AI Engineer,” because of a very simple observation that engineers would both be enabled by AI and would be uniquely able to explore the capability overhang far more effectively than “prompt engineers” on one hand, or, more controversially, “ML engineers” on the other. Since then, the thesis bore out: Everyone from top YC startups to the Metas, OpenAIs, and Anthropics of the world are building out multibillion-dollar AI Engineering/Forward Deployed Engineering orgs and saying “the model alone is no longer the product,” agentic models and the neoclouds/“AI Clouds” have drastically shifted compute workloads from training to inference and sandboxing, and prompt engineering gave way to rigorous evals, RL environments for post-training, and context/harness engineering. While there’s a new shiny thing every month, the fundamentals of both great product/software taste and ML intuition are more needed than ever, so we set out to build a home that is both timely and timeless.
The World’s Fair is now our largest flagship event of the AI engineering community. It has grown across tracks, across topics, and across the world, roughly doubling every year since its inception. Online, AI Engineer now reaches more than 1.5 million unique developers each month through our recorded talks. But those recordings are not the real reason you are here.
You are here because the most important parts of this gathering cannot be captured by an algorithm. You are here to meet people in person, to make friends, to find collaborators, and to discover ideas you would never have clicked on at home. Even as we discuss the future of AI and robotics, this event remains intensely human.
We have worked hard to curate some of the best speakers, sponsors, researchers, builders, and practitioners in the world. Please take the time to explore what they have brought here. Just as importantly, learn from one another. The attendees of this conference are among the best AI engineers in the world, representing finance, healthcare, legal, media, telecom, enterprise, startups, consumer products, and everything in between.
As the curators of AIE, we have tried to focus the program on the most urgent and useful questions of the moment: data quality, memory, continual learning, tokenmaxxing, vertical AI in healthcare, finance, and GTM, as well as enduring foundations like evals, inference, RAG, and security.
For the first time, we are also launching poster sessions, creating a dedicated space for papers, research discussion, and academic exchange. One of the World’s Fair’s most important roles is to bring research closer to industry, because research is where we see the next horizon forming.
We will close the show with our first Startup Battlefield, supported by the HyperAgent team, featuring judges including Garry Tan of Y Combinator. We are seeing a new generation of AI founders emerge from every background, and we want this stage to remind you that you can just build things.
AI Engineer is attended by thousands of people from countries all over the world. Our deepest hope is that you stay connected long after the event ends. We are increasingly bringing AIE to more places through partner events from Miami to Paris, Singapore, Melbourne, Shanghai, and next year, Tokyo.
If I could offer one piece of advice for getting the most out of the World’s Fair, it would be this: Spend 80% of your time looking for ideas you can use at work and 20% of your time exploring things you would never normally seek out.
Increase temperature, do parallel rollouts, continually learn memories… This is what the World’s Fair is for.
Welcome.
