Home Speakers Shawn Wang (swyx) Quote In the near future, nobody will recommend starting in AI Engineering by reading Attention is All You Need, just like you do not start driving by reading the schematics for the Ford Model T.
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More from Shawn Wang (swyx) Essay The Rise of the AI Engineer Jun 30, 2023
Foundation Models are “ few shot learners ”, exhibiting in-context learning and even zero shot transfer capabilities that generalize beyond the original intent of model trainers. In other words, the people creating the models don’t fully know what they are capable of. Essay The Rise of the AI Engineer Jun 30, 2023
I think software engineering will spawn a new subdiscipline, specializing in applications of AI and wielding the emerging stack effectively, just as “ site reliability engineer ”, “ devops engineer ”, “ data engineer ” and “ analytics engineer ” emerged. Essay The Rise of the AI Engineer Jun 30, 2023
There are 10x as many ML Engineer jobs as AI Engineer jobs on Indeed, but the higher growth rate of “AI” leads me to predict that this ratio will invert in 5 years. Essay The Rise of the AI Engineer Jun 30, 2023
We are observing a once in a generation “shift right” of applied AI, fueled by the emergent capabilities and open source/API availability of Foundation Models. A wide range of AI tasks that used to take 5 years and a research team to accomplish in 2013, now just require API docs and a spare afternoon in 2023.
On the same topics Blog I do not want your brains to rot Sep 17, 2026
Cognitive offloading is a strategic delegation that costs nothing. Cognitive surrender is something different; an uncritical abdication of reasoning itself. And there is something about AI, about its allure and potency, that could make surrender far more widespread. Blog I do not want your brains to rot Sep 17, 2026
Now advanced AI encourages us to delegate more and more, simpler and simpler tasks, weakening the practices that maintain our cognitive capacities. Essay How Universities Should Prepare Founders August 2026
And even if you have AIs writing all your code for you, you're still in the position of an engineering manager, and good engineering managers should be able to do the work of those working for them. Essay Banning AI in Law School: We've Seen This Before Jul 11, 2026
In the case of AI, the connection of AI to freedom of expression is unshakable and irrefutable. Essay What if everyone could afford an expert? Jun 18, 2026
More specifically, I believe it will become a norm, in the way that smartphones have become a norm, for billions of people worldwide to have a designated AI health advisor, an AI legal advisor, and a general-purpose AI tutor that they regularly consult with as they navigate their lives. Podcast Dwarkesh Podcast: AGI is still a decade away Oct 17, 2025
In my mind, education is the very difficult technical process of building ramps to knowledge. About this quote 
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