Welcome to New York City. Whether you came from a few blocks away or flew in from the other side of the world, you're in for a life-changing experience.
New York is AI Engineer’s second home in the United States. Some of our best talks ever and most memorable summits happened here last year. There’s a reason we keep coming back: this city takes new ideas and puts them to work at a scale few places can match. Frontier AI leaders from the West Coast come to meet centuries-old global financial institutions here, but also the people building in fashion, media, real estate, insurance, and every corner of the city’s economy. We moved dates: Fall is a beautiful time to visit, and I hope you get to enjoy New York beyond the conference too.
This one is personal for me: In some ways, the last 20 years of my life have led to this. I studied finance on the East Coast, then traded currency derivatives in Singapore, London, Dubai, Taiwan, and New York. I saw how much of a business moving billions of dollars in options, swaps, and futures still depended on making sense of language, and I built NLP programs (in Haskell!!) that rapidly powered our entire options desk — as both a trader and a technologist, I could finally see how being fluent in both creates far more impact than either individually.
Later, as a "quantamental" analyst at a hedge fund, I built trading and data pipelines and worked with alternative data, managing a >$1B portfolio in an era before Airflow, Modal, or Temporal. I saw how formalizing our PM's investing rules made us better at decision-making and scaled our small team to do far more than in the history of finance. Not everything was roses... I also saw how badly machines can go wrong, and why human judgment still matters, ESPECIALLY in key places. New York is where I REALLY learned to code, where I first became an engineer at Two Sigma, and also where I started my blogging career because DEV sponsored a conference exactly like this one. 10 years of writing and speaking later, we now have Latent.Space and AI Engineer.
The world is also bigger than finance. We offer you 5 tracks across finance (named for Jim Simons of RenTech), engineering (named for Claude Shannon, founder of information theory), leadership (named for Richard Sutton, the king of scale), evals (named for Alan Turing), and AI (named for John McCarthy, who led the 1955 Dartmouth workshop that created the field). We want to build the best AI conference New York City has to offer, and the best AI in finance conference anywhere. We humbly ask for your help to make us a lasting and positive fixture in the NYC landscape.
Over the next three days, I hope you find ideas, connections, and tools you can bring to your team tomorrow. I also hope you wander into a session outside your field, meet someone you disagree with, and discover an opportunity you hadn’t considered. Some of the smartest people working in AI are in New York this week. Take the time to learn from each other.
Thank you for being here. Welcome to AI Engineer New York!