Books
I do technical writing, creative nonfiction, and fiction—in both long form and really long form (books). I find that storytelling techniques from creative writing make technical concepts more accessible.
AI Engineering (O’Reilly, 2025)
Audiobook coming out in June 2025 on Audible.
This book discusses AI engineering: the process of building applications with readily available foundation models. It introduces a practical framework for developing an AI application and efficiently deploying it.
It also covers how to navigate the AI landscape, including models, datasets, evaluation benchmarks, and the seemingly infinite number of use cases and application patterns.
The book is available on Amazon, Kindle and the O'Reilly platform.
It’s been the most read book on O’Reilly since its release. See what people are talking about the book on Twitter @aisysbooks!
It’s currently being translated into Chinese, French, Japanese, Korean, Polish, and Russian.
Designing Machine Learning Systems (O’Reilly, 2022)
Audiobook coming out in July 2025 on Audible.
This book discusses a holistic approach to designing ML systems. It considers each design decision—such as how to process and create training data, which features to use, how often to retrain models, and what to monitor—in the context of how it can help your system as a whole achieve its objectives. The iterative framework in this book uses actual case studies backed by ample references.
Here's its GitHub repo with the full table of contents, chapter summaries, and some thoughts around tooling. See what people are talking about the book on Twitter @aisysbooks!
The book has been translated into 10+ languages including Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Polish, and Thai.
The book is available on Amazon (US, India, + other countries), Kindle, O’Reilly, and almost everywhere where technical books are sold.
Machine Learning Interviews (2021)
This book was written with the candidates in mind, but hiring managers who saw the early drafts have told me that they find the book useful to learn how other companies are hiring and rethink their own process. The book is free and open-source.
The book is being updated and will be incorporated into MVAIE, the minimum viable AIE curriculum!
Creative writing
Writing a story is like playing a game. You have to step into the mind of each character and anticipate not just what they’ll do next, but what their opponents will do too—and how every interaction will shift the dynamics between them.
Entanglements That Never End (Alexandria Song, 2025)
At eighteen, Linh thought she could outmaneuver anyone.
Using her stepmother's pregnancy to manipulate her shrewd father, she orchestrated her independence while quietly taking over her university club to build connections with Vietnam's business elite.
Impatient for power, she pursued a relationship she believed was hers to shape, only to find it slipping imperceptibly beyond her control, blurring the lines between love, obsession, and manipulation.
This darker coming-of-age story follows morally complex characters over fourteen years, exploring relationships with family, business, and messy romance, while questioning the emotional consequences of reducing every human interaction to a strategic calculation.
Audiobook coming soon! Sign up for early audio release here.
Creative non-fiction
Outside of technical writing, I’ve also published four books in Vietnam which have sold more than 100,000 copies. My first book was Tiki.vn’s #1 best-selling book of 2012. My first two books were among FAHASA Top 10 Readers’ Choice Books 2014.
Chip Huyen’s books on Goodreads
Xách Ba Lô Lên Và Đi - Tập 1: Châu Á Là Nhà. Đừng Khóc!
ratings: 1332 (avg rating 3.85)
Designing Machine Learning Systems: An Iterative Process for Production-Ready Applications
ratings: 7 (avg rating 4.43)
Stories
Most of my writing is creative non-fiction, but occassionally, I indulge myself in the fictional world. Here are some of my old writing samples.
Anything I want
Even after you’ve washed them away, in the water that you take from the big tank Mom saves for cooking, there’s still that bitter, lemony taste on what is left.
Unnamed
It was the end of my second year and I was already sick of school. Sick, sick, sick, sick. A sophomore with the soul of a 5th year post-doc.