Together with my fellow authors of “What We’ve Learned From A Year of Building with LLMs”, we were invited to give the closing keynote at the AI Engineer World’s Fair 2024.

Speaking at the closing keynote of AIEWF 2024

Here are the slides (with the recording to be released soon). I wish I had the time to make the formatting more consistent, but the slides were only finalized the night before keynote and I was too exhausted after the intense and enriching conversations (my bat signals on twitter and linkedin worked well) and social activities, lots of social activities.

Reflections on preparing for the keynote

Have you ever attended a talk with six speakers? Me neither. It was challenging to figure out a format that was entertaining, educational, and inspiring for the audience. Based on feedback received (example), I think we did a decent job.

Along the way, we debated whether to do a panel or to go up on stage in pairs. We resolved the debate by writing one-pagers for the panel format and 2 x 2 x 2 format. We eventually converged on the paired speaker format (aka 2 x 2 x 2), which on hindsight, I think was the right decision. While it needed more preparation and coordination, it resulted in a closing keynote that was higher signal-to-noise and energy. Overall, I learned a lot about how to prepare a talk with so many fellow speakers, though I probably won’t be doing a talk or panel with so many speakers anytime soon.

Stepping in as replacement host for fireside chat

Unfortunately, our dear friend and AIE World’s Fair organizer Swyx was unable to attend in person. Thus, I hosted the fireside chat, “Copilots Everywhere”, with GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke. Coincidentally, I had dinner with him the previous week (organized by a VC) where we had built a connection. Nonetheless, it was intimidating to host someone of his stature and I could not have done it without the coaching from Swyx, Ben, and Hamel.

Hosting the fireside chat with GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke

• • •

Overall, I had a great time at the AIEWF conference (and SF in general) and will definitely be attending the next one. Here’s a short reflection of my time there, and a small tweet thread documenting how well online friends vibed offline ♥️

If you found this useful, please cite this write-up as:

Yan, Ziyou. (Jun 2024). AIE World's Fair 2024 Keynote - What We Learned from a Year of LLMs. eugeneyan.com. https://eugeneyan.com/speaking/aie-2024/.

or

@article{yan2024aiewf,
  title   = {AIE World's Fair 2024 Keynote - What We Learned from a Year of LLMs},
  author  = {Yan, Ziyou},
  journal = {eugeneyan.com},
  year    = {2024},
  month   = {Jun},
  url     = {https://eugeneyan.com/speaking/aie-2024/}
}