The Making of an Industry: The Rise of AI Engineering, with Swyx

Meet Shawn Wang (Swyx) 🇺🇸! Swyx is a developer, writer, and startup advisor. If you listen to our show regularly, you know him as the biggest advocate for learning in public! Today, he's the founder of smol.ai and a podcast host and teacher at Latent Space. Last summer, Swyx wrote a blog post titled The Rise of the AI Engineer, which quickly went viral.

In this episode, Swyx will revisit that blog post to see if anything changed. You will learn why AI engineers are a thing, the differences between AI and ML engineers, and why the demand for this specialization is larger than the supply. Swyx also reveals what defines an industry (and why it's not only about tools) and gives many good examples of successful products made using existing foundation models. Swyx and Alex also talk about the inner workings of AI and whether it's a good idea to run AI models on your own hardware.

🔗 Connect with Swyx

• 👨‍💼 Linkedin
• 🌐 Website
• 🌐 smol.ai
• 🏫Latent Space

🧰 Resources Mentioned

• The Coding Career Handbook by Swyx (30% discount applied when you use this link)

Episode source