Amplify

2026 State of AI Engineering — Barr Yaron, Amplify Partners

Jul 21, 2026 · 19:47

In the 2026 State of AI Engineering survey presented by Amplify Partners' Barr Yaron, 1,048 AI engineers reveal that cost is now a first-class engineering constraint—40% say it regularly shapes how ambitiously they use AI. Agents have exploded: 95% of teams now use agents, and 89% of those agents have write access, tripling from last year. Image generation adoption doubled to 36%, while audio shows the strongest intent-to-adopt at 56%. Open-weight models augment rather than replace closed models—45% use open-weight, but over 90% of them also use closed models. Evals remain the top infrastructure challenge, and inference is the most bought layer, while prompt management (61% built in-house) stays close to product logic. Teams report 97% net positive impact, but 59% fear long-term liabilities from AI code, and over a third say non-developers now ship features.

The 2025 AI Engineering Report — Barr Yaron, Amplify

Aug 1, 2025 · 12:33

Barr Yaron presents early findings from the 2025 State of AI Engineering survey at the AI Engineer World's Fair. The survey reveals that while titles vary widely, the community is broad and technical, with nearly half of seasoned software engineers having worked with AI for three years or less. Over half of respondents use LLMs for both internal and external use cases, with 3 of the top 5 models for customer-facing products from OpenAI. RAG is the most popular customization method (70%), and fine-tuning is surprisingly common, with 40% using LoRA or QLoRA. More than 50% update models monthly, and 70% update prompts at least monthly. A 'multimodal production gap' exists, with image, video, and audio usage lagging text. 80% say LLMs work well, but less than 20% say the same about agents, though most plan to use them. Evaluation is the top pain point.

Frontier Feud: Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta FAIR, Thinking Machines — Barr Yaron, Amplify

Apr 19, 2025 · 22:26

Teams from Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta FAIR, and Thinking Machines compete in a Frontier Feud game hosted by Barr Yaron at the AI Engineer Summit 2025. Surveyed AI engineers name Ilya Sutskever as the most influential AI researcher, with Andrej Karpathy, Jeff Hinton, and Yann LeCun also on the board. Cost is the top consideration when choosing a model, followed by latency, eval scores, and open vs. closed source. The buzzword everyone is tired of hearing is AGI, with RAG and prompt engineering trailing. In the fast money round, Cursor tops favorite AI tools, 'Attention Is All You Need' wins most influential paper, and hardware failure is the biggest 2 a.m. nightmare. The winning team, Rocco's Basilisk, takes home a massive llama and other prizes.