Ben Dunphy: recommendation

Transcript context

…industry. The overall idea of this is that I kind of view AI engineering, at least in all my work in Latent Space and the other stuff, as starting an industry. And I think every industry, every new community, needs a place to congregate. And I definitely think that AI engineer, at least at the conference, is that it's meant to be like the biggest gathering of technical engineering people working with AI. Right. I think we kind of got that spot last year. There was a very competitive conference season, especially in San Francisco. But I think as far as I understand, in terms of cultural impact, online impact, and the speakers that people want to see, we, we got them all and it was very important for us to be a vendor neutral type of event. Right. , The reason I partnered with Ben is that Ben has a lot of experience, a lot more experience doing vendor neutral stuff. I first met you when I was speaking at one of your events, and now we're sort of business partners on that. And yeah, I mean, I don't know if you have any sort of Thoughts on make, making things vendor neutral, making things more of a community industry conference rather than like something that's owned by one company. Yeah. I mean events that are owned by a company are great, but this is typically where you have product pitches and this smaller internet community. But if you want the truly internet community, if you want a more varied audience and you know, frankly, better content for, especially for a technical audience, you want a vendor neutral event. And this is because when you have folks that are running the event that are focused on one thing and one thing alone, which is quality, quality of content, quality of speakers, quality of the in person experience, and just of general relevance it really elevates everything to the next level. And when you have someone like yourself who's coming To this content curation the role that you take at this event, and bringing that neutrality with, along with your experience, that really helps to take it to the next level, and then when you have someone like myself, focusing on just the program curation, and the in person experience, then both of our forces combined, we can like, really create this epic event, and so, these vendor neutral events if you've been to a small community event, Typically, these are vendor neutral, but also if you've been to a really, really popular industry event, many of the top industry events are actually vendor neutral. And that's because of the fact that they're vendor neutral, not in spite of it. Yeah, I've been pretty open about the fact that my dream is to build the KubeCon of AI. So if anyone has been in the Kubernetes world, they'll understand what that means. And then, or, or instead of the NeurIPS, NeurIPS for engineers, where engineers are the stars and engineers are sharing their knowledge. Perspectives, because I think AI is definitely moving over from research to engineering and production. I think one of my favorite parts was just honestly having GitHub and Microsoft support, which we'll cover in a bit, but you know, announcing finally that GitHub's copilot was such a commercial success I think was the first time that was actually confirmed by anyone in public. For me, it's also interesting as sort of the conference curator to put Microsoft next to competitors some of which might be much smaller AI startups and to see what, where different companies are innovating in different areas. Well, they're next to…

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