Announcing the AI Engineer Network: Benjamin Dunphy

Engineers, founders, sponsors, partners, colleagues, and friends, welcome to the AI Engineer Summit 2023. I am—yeah,

yeah—I am deeply honored to have the opportunity to host you all at this event with my co-host, Swix. And I'm especially delighted to kick off the presentation portion of the summit. We've curated 2 days of stage talk content for you from some of the top founders and engineers in this burgeoning new industry of AI Engineering.

In just a few moments, Swix is going to come on stage to help set the context for those talks. But for my time on stage, I really want to know who is here. So, Auto-GPT is here.

Woohoo!

A few months ago, they were just an open-source project. Mind you, the fastest-growing open-source project in history, but just an open-source project. Now they are the presenting sponsor of the AI Engineer Summit. So needless to say, we can expect some big announcements when Toran takes the stage in a few moments.

Let's see who else is here. Supabase! Supabase is here. The social media experts who make product launches fun. And who make databases both easy and trustworthy, uh, given that they're open-source. They are a diamond sponsor this year, and we're honored that they broke their no-event sponsorships policy for this event.

So, Paul and, uh, let me know how that policy change works out for you.

Fixie is here.

Woo!

Where's Fixie? I'm looking forward to asking their booth sidekick if they can see what I'm wearing yet, and if they can recommend any updates to my wardrobe. We'll call this sidekick Derek. Uh, and if Vision is not in the cards yet, Matt and Ben, uh, I can make an intro to Logan Kilpatrick and perhaps we can get a preview of that Vision API.

Microsoft is here. The company who helped to commercialize this movement by pumping $13 billion into OpenAI.

And many of you might be thinking, well, how can I get some of that gravy for my startup? Well, head over to their booth in the Carmel Room, just past the elevators behind you, and have a chat. They have representatives from Microsoft for Startups who can help to open those doors for you.

And if you have any questions for the Copilot team, well, Microsoft's booth isright next to GitHub. Oh, and happy belated birthday, Cloudflare, who is here.

Woo!

Round of applause. They have, uh—Cloudflare, you are now 13, so that means you're going to be going through some changes. But don't worry, there's plenty of folks who will be delighted to talk to you about those changes at your booth, just next to Microsoft in Carmel, across the elevators.

Alessio Finelli is here.

Woohoo!

The VC half of the Latent State podcast, but no less technical than Swix. Perhaps after watching some of today's talks, we can convince him to come back to the founder world. A little bit easier,right? But this time, Alessio, let's get you a software startup and leave the hardware to the experts.

Some of you got that joke.

And who else is here? Well, of course, you. You're one of 500 people who were selected to attend the inaugural AI Engineer Summit. So give yourselves a round of applause.

This means that you're not only an experienced software engineer, but that you're actively experimenting with, shipping to production, or have founded an AI-enhanced or AI-native apps and companies. So I want you to remember this when you're interacting with one another.

But we also want to recognize the many people who are not here today, but are watching the livestream. We thank you and appreciate you, and we hope that you enjoy the content on the livestream. And be sure to watch tomorrow's opening keynote address for some exciting announcements for 2024, which will expand our participation limits.

But for those of you who are here, we hope that you've been enjoying your conversations with other attendees so far. One of the reasons that I really love conferences is that it brings together experts from around the world who are passionate about a singular niche subject.

And so most of your conversations are already high signal. But is there a way we can actually improve this?

Many of you have downloaded our conference mobile app, Network, and have been enjoying its use. It includes the conference schedule, a full list of all of our expo partners, recommended restaurants, bars, and cafes within walking distance of the venue, and other event information.

But in addition to these features, we're pleased to announce AI-Enhanced Matching. Using our generative matching algorithm, which is a fancy way of saying we use LLMs to match you with theright people, we can match you with people who help to solve your stated problems.

We all have problems we need to solve. That's why in your network profile, you can literally tell us what problem you're looking to have solved, and our GMA will connect you with theright people. We call this app Network.

You can download the app today at ai.engineer/Network. The matching is currently limited to in-person attendees of this summit only, but we have one more big announcement that we'd like to make. We are pleased to announce that we are open-sourcing Network, both the event app and the matching algorithm.

Our goal is to provide a simple yet powerful mobile event experience for attendees at any event around the world. And we hope that the matching algorithm can better assist to connect people at those events. And we'd like to thank our lead engineer, Simon Sturmer, for the mobile app, and Sweezett's teller for our generative matching algorithm, and our infrastructure partners, Dscope for auth and Supabase for database and PG vector.

So go talk to them about PG vector outside. So round of applause for all of our developers, partners,

for this app.

So you can access the repo today at ai.engineer/Network or github.com/ai.engineer/Network. So with that, I'd love to welcome our first speaker to the stage. He's the co-host of the Latent Space podcast and the co-founder of this very summit. Please join me in welcoming to the stage Swix.