6 Things to Know about AIE World's Fair 2026

Sixteen snow about AI engineering World's Fair. Hi, I'm Swix. If you didn't know, I'm one of the co-founders of AI engineering and there's uh 15 of us now working really hard day and night, even on weekends, to bring you the show. We've been really uh overblown by how uh positive the response has been, especially uh for this World's Fair. And we figured we should post some kind of update uh from people behind the scenes, but we didn't have a ton of budget to do it. So, this is me and my uh working place and uh doing all this in one shot. Uh we did 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. 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. So, um if you stick around, I've been told for YouTube purposes, I'm going to tell you how we're going to be getting all these exclusive attendee perks uh featuring $38,000 in terms of uh sponsor offers, which I'm very excited about. So, stay tuned and hit sub. Um the general vibe of this video is we want to show you a little bit behind the scenes of what we're building. Um and uh I figured, you know, like I think the I like the number six. Six is good like well, not too many. Like there is a lot of stuff going on when you're organizing 600 people, but here are the big six things that you might 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 cuz if you do the math, we actually we're we're a little bit over that. 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. 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 do we 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 cover your selection of all these things. Um so, we've grown a lot over the last six, seven events that we've done. And also, as you may have seen, the really successful my Melbourne, Miami, and Singapore event with Paris coming up in June. Um we've also really grown a lot on YouTube. 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. Uh and we're expecting this to the largest AIE that we've ever had. So, we're really glad about the all the support online. Um 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 new topics that are super relevant. Um our top tracks are like auto research that didn't exist last 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. And then we've also added memory and 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. Uh compared to last year, there's there's 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. 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. Uh part two is 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 want to do is the hallway track. 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 YouTube. Obviously, like everything's recorded. I think obviously, the interesting thing is like the stuff that you get off right, like which is real real real offer. Yeah, it is. Uh, but it to me it's really insane that for the price of an Explorer Explorer ticket, which is kind of like our cheapest like uh, entry-level tier, um, you just get to just wander the the floor. Uh, that to me that was always the vision of 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. It's a pretty good deal. Um, compared to last year, this is how it was last year for 2025. It is roughly 4x bigger. Uh, we've got a lot of entertainment, so it's not all just business business business. Um, it is at Moscone West, which um, we, you know, we've we're very familiar with now and we're really loving hosting the show there. Everything happens in that building. Uh, but we're really using the space really well, which I'm really liking. So, we're starting to sort of name all these 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, that's my baby. Uh, keep a look out 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 AI as well. 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. So, if you want to catch up, this is the spot. Um, the other thing that I often talk about when uh, like when sort of explaining like what is our trend of AI engineering, um, it is that we want to be inclusive. We want to sort of grow the audience a little bit every every single year. And the relationship with 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. Uh, 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 And I think that's definitely very true. And I think it should be true for us. Like we 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 and Agentic Systems, supported by these lovely people, uh, some of whom have been on our speaker list and some of our speakers as well. Um, but really what they've done is basically let us do an industry spotlight selection. Some of the stuff that is relevant for you this year, some of whom are are just, uh, speaking again. Uh, if you haven't been to any of these academic conferences, they're really massive of like industry, academic sort of presentation markets. Uh, this is a photo of NeurIPS. Not all of them are as big as this one. For NeurIPS, it's 40 years old. But, um, really like they're 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 some is a very important thing for breaking through the algorithm. Because, um I think the the feed is in the in the recommendation systems and the other 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 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. 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, 6 months out of date by the time they reach the floor, all those things. And really like I think I 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. Um there's 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 on AI. Um so if you like posting on Twitter uh and if you have a hot take, we're going to print it out, we're going to put it on the same level as a poster session with with no AI, and you're going to just defend your tweet. Oh my god, where is that uh image today? Prepared. 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. Um GPT image fail. Tell me how to fix it. Or actually tell Gabriel how to fix it. Cuz that's who we invited uh from OpenAI. Okay. Um part four, 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 gigantic organizations. Um we have a few in new initiatives where we've had this sort of track for the last 3 years. We have this new a few new initiatives that I want to 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. 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. Here's Ryan Lepore at AI 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. 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. You think of it as like an MX platinum lounge or something where you're just going to have a different kind of conversation for someone who uses it. Um some of this they're going to be heavily LM psychosis. As in I think they'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 going to be a really interesting diversion. Alex Volkov from Weights & Biases calls this the ZL spectrum after Mario Zechner. Uh also a talk that is coming at Full Stack. And we also are introducing thematic focuses. We used to just have sort of undifferentiated like you're a leader and architect, we'll just slot you in with someone who's like something vaguely related. Here to uh 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're 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. Um and I think that also maps to like 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 Code Summit, uh this beautiful shirt. Um McKinsey'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 in your company and what they think about it. Um so, they're working on a tokenomics thing, uh working on 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 uh design engineering as a track and product management as a track. 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. Uh so, for this year, we've picked uh four deployed engineering, genetic commerce, health care, finance, and GTM. Um this is partially inspired by Chris Lovejoy, who was one of our top speakers from a couple years now. Um and I really like this screen share that uh I've set up you watch it. So, we have all these tracks, right? FDE, uh genetic commerce, health care, and AI and GTM. The special one that takes precedence above all of them is AI in finance, which is our big bet for New York. Um so, we are also going to pre-announce AI engineer New York. 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. Um and so, I think uh if there was a vertical after code that is the most likely and closest for takeoff, it is finance, uh closely followed by health care law, FD, GTA, all these things. Um, so I think that's interesting and self-evident, but this in itself is its own like a collection of verticals and understanding what they are. And then finally, I think to make the most use out of uh, your time at World's Fair, there's a whole bunch of side events. I should I intended to show you how to navigate the website. You just go to ai.engineer/wf. Um, we have a LVM D 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. 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 conversation after the the the main day of events, this is where you go. A few side events I would highlight. Um, NEO is sorry. Well, first of all, the ultimate side event, World Cup. Happening with us, now confirmed to be a Team USA event. 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. Um, we're actually doing after some feedback from Engineer Europe, we're actually doing our first NEO, new engineer orientation. Uh, this is literally for people who are coming on their own. So usually World's Fair is kind of designed as kind of come go go with your friends, go with your team, 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 day, sort of like a map reduce. Um, uh, for NEO, uh, if you're coming alone or 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. Um so far we have 300 people signed up. I think this is going to go to 1,000 people. So, we need help. Um we're going to have a lot of newbies. A lot of everyone's going to ask the same exact questions. We have a chatbot. No one's going to use it. We know this. So, we just people want to talk to humans, I know. So, it's the it's the irony of AI that you know, even as much as we believe and like AI, we do still want to talk to humans. That's why we're all here. So, we're setting up Neo. Um also a new one this one I had nothing to do with cuz I don't have kids. Um but the the kind 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. Um I don't know the rules around this. I I'm they're doing it, but I just I'm just highlighting it cuz it's cool. Uh I do think that we do want to be supportive and inclusive and um you know, I guess one of our KBIs is like the amount of relationships that we're starting to for- form for families and couples. Um there have been couples that have met at AEI and you know, I 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. 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? 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 and database. Just come, okay? Yeah. Anyway, so that's the recap. Uh six things to know about AEI. Um 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. 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 AEI AEI 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 slob. We're still fighting slob. Where 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. 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. See you.