AI Engineer World's Fair 2026
The biggest annual conference for AI engineers and builders, curated by swyx and the Latent Space team in San Francisco.
About this event
AI Engineer World Fair is the worlds largest conference dedicated to the engineers building production AI systems, not the researchers publishing papers. Founded in 2023 by Shawn swyx Wang and the Latent Space podcast team, the conference defined the AI Engineer role and grew from a few hundred attendees in its first year to over 6,000 in 2025. The 2026 edition runs June 29 to July 2 at Moscone Center in San Francisco, expanding to four days and ten parallel engineering tracks.
The programming covers what actually matters for shipping AI in production: agent architectures, evaluation frameworks, retrieval-augmented generation patterns, fine-tuning recipes, voice and multimodal systems, AI infrastructure and observability, and the practical realities of cost, latency, and reliability at scale. Speakers come from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, Microsoft, the frontier startups, and the engineering teams at Fortune 500 companies actually deploying AI. The format strongly favors war stories, working demos, and concrete patterns over academic abstractions.
The attendee mix is what makes the conference singular: senior engineers, engineering managers, CTOs, and founders, with very little academic representation. Recruiting is intense, the hallway track is legendary, and the conference effectively serves as the annual all hands meeting for the global AI engineering community. Co-located workshops, a sponsor expo, and after parties at SF startups round out the week. For anyone building with LLMs in production, the AI Engineer World Fair is the most useful conference of the year.