The AI Engineer Conference Goes Global: A Conversation with Latent Space's Founder

The first AIE (AI Engineer) conference in China is about to launch in Shanghai, marking a significant milestone for a community that began as a simple blog during the stable diffusion era. The founder of Latent Space and AIE, a Singaporean who moved through finance into tech, explains how he built a global conference franchise, why he believes SaaS companies are in trouble, and what makes Chinese founders uniquely formidable.

Learning in Public and the Birth of AI Engineering

The core principle that shaped everything came from a career transition: moving from finance to tech revealed a fundamental difference in how knowledge works. In finance, information is zero-sum—if you share what you know, it loses value. In tech, it's positive-sum—sharing increases value. This insight drove the "learning in public" approach that became the foundation of Latent Space.

When stable diffusion launched in 2022, the founder was working at a startup that wasn't growing fast. He started a blog to learn AI publicly, writing analysis that eventually caught the attention of Stability AI's CEO. The blog became Latent Space, which was just a writing project until ChatGPT's launch prompted hackathons and community events.