I finally finished reading AI Engineering by Chip Huyen. It is a truly amazing book in many ways, but to name a few:
It is comprehensive: From hardware to software, from foundation models to user-facing applications, the author covers almost every aspect we can think of when it comes to AI engineering. I was astonished by how huge the field is, and there are myriad things to know and consider when building an AI-powered application. Of course, the book was published a while ago (early this year), so it cannot cover the most recent updates in the AI industry, but it tries to explain the essential parts rather than excessive details.
It is reader-friendly and well organized: I have read many technical books for my profession, but obviously there are so many books that simply "dump" explanations with insufficient context and incoherent structure. This book reads as if there were a young graduate student tutor at a university who tries to make you understand as much as possible. There are hardly any difficult concepts left unexplained, and each of the chapters has a clear and reasonable structure.
It is a well-grounded technical book: The author doesn't simply tell you what things are based solely on her own opinions. Every paragraph is full of quotations from trusted technical papers, blogs, articles, and more. You might feel like you are reading a technical report or a paper from an AI conference. Therefore, I think this book is very useful as a reference that you can return to frequently. I would probably re-read it a few months.
Overall, I think the book is a very good start to understanding the general concepts of AI engineering and the field itself. Of course, given the depth of its content, the book serves not only as an excellent introduction but also as a valuable reference.
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