AI Engineering Building Applications with Foundation Models 1st Edition by Chip Huyen (2025)

AI Engineering: Building Applications with Foundation Models (2025) by Chip Huyen is the definitive practical guide to building production AI systems with large language models and other foundation models. An Amazon #1 Bestseller in Enterprise Applications, this O'Reilly title distills the emerging discipline of AI engineering into a coherent framework for developers, engineering leaders, and product teams moving AI from prototype to production.

Recent breakthroughs in AI have lowered the barriers to building intelligent applications — the model-as-a-service approach has transformed AI from an esoteric research discipline into a practical development toolkit accessible to anyone. In this book, Chip Huyen explains how AI engineering differs from traditional machine learning engineering and walks through the modern AI stack end-to-end.

Topics covered in depth: foundation model fundamentals; the AI engineering stack; evaluation methodology for open-ended models including AI-as-a-judge approaches; prompt engineering techniques and patterns; retrieval-augmented generation (RAG); agentic workflows and tool use; fine-tuning strategies; dataset engineering; inference optimization; latency, cost, and quality trade-offs; deployment architectures; monitoring and observability; user feedback loops; and building defensible AI products.

Ideal for: software engineers transitioning into AI; ML engineers adapting to foundation models; technical leaders evaluating AI strategy; startup founders building AI-native products; data scientists working with LLMs; and anyone building with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, or open-source models.