The landscape of AI applications has rapidly evolved, with LLMs becoming fully multimodal, tool calls growing in sophistication, and provider APIs diverging significantly. To meet these challenges, the Vercel AI SDK has undergone its biggest transformation yet. In this talk, Lars Grammel from the Vercel AI SDK team will introduce AI SDK 5, a ground-up rewrite designed to provide a powerful and stable foundation for building the next generation of AI applications.

Lars will discuss why a major breaking change was necessary, moving away from an incremental approach that struggled to keep pace with new features like signed reasoning from Anthropic. He will detail the architecture of AI SDK 5, focusing on its three core pillars: a completely revamped provider specification to handle multimodal outputs and provider-executed tools, a fully type-safe UI and chat layer for building complex and maintainable frontends, and new controls for creating sophisticated agentic tool-calling loops.

What you'll discover:

• The "Why" behind AI SDK 5: Understand the challenges of incremental development that led to a major rewrite.
• New Provider architecture: Learn about the v2 provider spec that supports ordered, multimodal outputs and provider-executed tools.
• End-to-end type safety: See how typed metadata, data parts, and tool calls enable building complex, maintainable UI components.
• Building agentic loops: Discover new controls like the prepare step and stopWhen conditions for managing multi-step tool-calling agents.
• Enhanced chat capabilities: Explore the more powerful and flexible chat components with swappable transports and UI framework independence.
• The future of AI SDK: Get a sneak peek at upcoming features, including improved telemetry and image editing capabilities.