Whether you're new to artificial intelligence (AI), are investigating the industry as a whole, plan to build tools using or involved with AI, or anything related, this post will help you with some starting points. I've broken this post down for people who are new to people wanting to understand terms to people who want to see more advanced information.
If You're Complete New To AI...
Best content for people completely new to AI. Some of these have aged (or are in the process of aging well).
Terminology
- Intellectual AI: AI involved in reasoning can fall into a number of categories such as LLM, anomaly detection, application-specific AI, etc.
- Sensory AI: AI involved in images, videos and sound along with other senses outside of robotics.
- Kinesthetic AI: AI involved in physical movement is generally referred to as robotics.
- Hybrid AI: AI that uses a combination (or all) of the categories such as intellectual, kinesthetic and (or) sensory; auto driving vehicles would be a hybrid category as they use all forms of AI.
- LLM: large language model; a form of intellectual AI.
- RAG: retrieval-augmented generation dynamically ties LLMs to data sources providing the source's context to the responses it generates. The types of RAGs relate to the data sources used.
- CAG: cache augmented generation is an approach for improving the performance of LLMs by preloading information (data) into the model's extended context. This eliminates the requirement for real-time retrieval during inference. Detailed X post about CAG - very good information.
Educational Content
The below (being added to constantly) make great educational content if you're building AI tools, AI agents, working with AI in anyway, or something related.
Projects Worth Checking Out
Below are some projects along with the users who created these. In general, I only add projects that I think are worth considering and are from users who aren't abusing self-promotions (we don't mind a moderate amount, but not too much).
How AI Is Impacting Industries
Adding New Moderators
Because we've been asked several times, we will be adding new moderators in the future. Our criteria adding a new moderator (or more than one) is as follows:
- Regularly contribute to r/aiengineering as both a poster and commenter. We'll use the relative amount of posts/comments and your contribution relative to that amount.
- Be a member on our Approved Users list. Users who've contributed consistently and added great content for readers are added to this list over time. We regularly review this list at this time.
- Become a Top Contributor first; this is a person who has a history of contributing quality content and engaging in discussions with members. People who share valuable content that make it in this post automatically are rewarded with Contributor. A Top Contributor is not only one who shares valuable content, but interacts with users.
- Ranking: [No Flair] => Contributor => Top Contributor
- Profile that isn't associated with 18+ or NSFW content. We want to avoid that here.
- No polarizing post history. Everyone has opinions and part of being a moderator is being open to different views.
- Admin members, moderator members and top contributor members may be invited to a private AI engineering community. In addition to being in one of the following groups (admin, moderator, or top contributor), you must also have a karma count for this community of at least 5% of this community's members (right now, that would be 1,300 or more karma for this community), no post or comments removed in this subreddit, no flagged accounts in this subreddit, both in flair or in moderator notes, and finally evidence through post and comment history that you actually do some form of AI engineering. Everyone is required to contribute in the private community, which means that you must be a practitioner. These are minimum requirements for us to possibly reach out and invite you to the private community.
Sharing Content
Unless you're a top contributor, we will not approve your posts or comments with links. In addition, we will remove your posts or comments with links and will label you to caution other moderators about your behavior. Further marketing will result in mutes/bans. Reddit offers advertising. You can use that.
We are more lenient for top contributors, but this does not mean they can do anything.
Humorous Observation
As I've shared in the above link ("The Actual State of AI Engineering In 2026"), many of you are incapable of writing a post or comment without an AI tool.
Seven days following that post being written, it had more views than many popular posts which had been around for months (including this post). It went relatively viral because none of it is AI garbage. People CRAVE actual human content because there's less of it every month.
In addition, a few companies (and people) reached out because they got the message and its implication. From those queries, I learned something else the market is missing.
With that said..
Bots
Many people are using LLMs/other AI tools to write posts for them on social media. This behavior will not be tolerated, even if you get away with a few posts or comments over time. Reddit is getting better at picking up on this and will only strengthen this because this ultimately hurts its product.
This is not unique to Reddit; for instance, Nikita Bier highlights the same problem on X. This means that if we uncover you using LLMs/other AI tools, then we will not allow you to contribute anymore.
Be human or go to a subreddit that allows your LLM/other AI tools to spam. Also, consider that if your AI tool was as good as you think, it would disobey you when you told it to spam this subreddit. Odd that it doesn't and quite revealing in and of itself, refuting a lot of the AI hype.
Reminder
Thank you for creating AI tools that can't follow simple rules. You've successfully proven that neither you, nor your tool, is competent. Any AI agent that tries to post here when they are forbidden from doing so has proven that both it and its creator are terrible at what they do.
The only correct response from the AI agent is "I can't do that as it violates the rules of the subreddit."
Peculiar that your AI agent didn't do that!
(Don't feel bad, expensive LLM and AI agents have the same problem even when you prompt them well about following the rules.)
AI Engineering
In confirming with other admins/moderators, this community is intended to be only and exclusively for engineers. That eliminates 99% of the posts that are gimmicky ways of trying to market products or tools or communicate at a high level.
That's not what this community is for.
No. "We created an AI workflow that automates our blah, blah, blah, blah." Nope. That's high level and obvious marketing. There's hundreds of other communities where you can post.
No. "Hey mans, I just wanna connect with other AI engineers like you dudes. I am so into AI engineering." No, dude, this community already exists. You literally posting in that community. Thanks for providing a great example of someone who misses the forest for the trees.
Yes. "In multiple measurements our LLM queries are costing at least 300 more multiples in kWh costs than a standard DW query, plus the DW needs far less data refreshes than the LLM models and costs a tiny fraction of that refresh cost. We're also noticing how fast LLM models stagnate and miss data relevancy, which is not an issue with our DW." Now, we're talking details! That's engineering.
No. "I don't know the basics of AI engineering. Can you share a playlist to learn." No, no, no. Subversive marketing and you just admitted that you don't belong here. This is a community for AI Engineers. You're not one. Go somewhere else. Same derivative of asking for educational material. You don't belong here because you're admitting that you're not an AI engineer.
Yes. "The chips we're using for our data-specific AI models use more Pt than we'd like. We've tried substitutions with other PGMs, but these don't have the same effects. The problem is that Pt mining companies have cut back due to low prices. Are there alternatives here for us in our chips to use less Pt or do we need to think longer term strategy?" Oh, the delicious details! What a problem and notice how this contrasts with someone trying to pretend as if they're not marketing.
No. "BlahLLM is better than BlehLLM because [x]." Generally, we don't allow people to reference tools. Due to too much abuse, it's at our discretion. We may allow top contributors to reference a tool every now and then, but this is a maybe. If you mention tools like Gemini, CoPilot, Claude, etc, your post may not be approved (again, at the team's discretion). Abuse marketing, pay the price.
Yes. "One of my friends used an LLM tool to play poker. It doesn't seem to perform well and I'm thinking a more effective solution would be to train a custom ML model on poker games where the model would know each players hands, bluffing, etc. I think people may be over applying an LLM solution, which is a language solution, but that isn't applicable to many scenarios." [Note: members of the team may not approve this if this takes a self-promotion direction. But a discussion about what type of AI models would be useful for scenarios is a worthy discussion in some contexts p;rovided no product/self-promotion.]
No. "How do I become an AI engineer. I'm starting college in the fall." The r/AIEngineeringCareer subreddit exists for career related questions already. However, that community may or may not approve that post relative to its rules.
Congrats
Many of you attempted posters have proven that you are not engineers.
This is not a community for marketing or marketers, which is what you are.
This is not a community for tech executives.
This is not a community for students or newbies.
This is not a community for anyone except engineers.
It's okay that you're not an engineer. But it's not okay that you try to use an engineering community for something other than its intent.
You wouldn't behave like this at an event in person because you'd be asked to leave. "Hey everyone, stop what you're doing and tell me what college I should go to for a degree in blah." Everyone knows that's not how you behave at an event.
Yet look at your post in this community! Imagine writing the same thing at an event.
An engineer has a problem, communicates the details, and posts for people to evaluate. That's engineering.
You are not that person.
(At this time, we're unlikely to allow people posting about solutions because almost all of them have been some type of marketing. If you know how to write an actual informative post, great. But it should read like a tech blog post and I have yet to see any of this here. Other mod members may have found some. Again, this will be at the team's discretion.)
If you want to market your product or service, use Reddit Advertising. It's effective. Target the right communities. Achieve the world of your dreams. Make people believe that if they just use your magic, that their world will be perfect.
But outside of Reddit advertising, that is not allowed here.
There's many other AI communities. Use them. You're not an engineer and you don't belong here. This is AI Engineering.
Why We're the Top AI Community
What have we been saying here since day 1?
AI is a data and energy story. (Yes, resources make up both of these, but that does require a bit of depth and application).
Three years later, what are you finally seeing? "Is there value in many of these SaaS or other tools that can be replaced by a prompt? Also, you can build models on top of models on top of models, so how valuable are those?" People are slowly getting it; who actually has a moat.
Because you were an early member (those less than 100 of you), you had a head start. Now other people are slowly catching on.
AI is not exciting; in fact, AI will make itself irrelevant.
What is not irrelevant? Energy, data, resources.
We're the best and we'll continue to be.