AI-enabled automation is often portrayed as a binary on-or-off: A process is either automated or not. But in practice, automation is a spectrum, and AI teams have to choose where on this spectrum to operate. It’s important to...

When a lot of data is available, machine learning is great at automating decisions. But when data is scarce, consider using the data to augment human insight, so people can make better decisions...

Over the last several decades, driven by a multitude of benchmarks, supervised learning algorithms have become really good at achieving high accuracy on test datasets. As valuable as this is...

The price of shares in video game retailer GameStop (NYSE: GME) gyrated wildly last week. Many people viewed the stock’s rapid ascent as a David-versus-Goliath story: Tech-savvy individual retail investors coordinated their trades online to push up the price...

Last week, I talked about how best practices for machine learning projects are not one-size-fits-all, and how they vary depending on whether a project uses structured or unstructured data, and whether the dataset is small or big. Another dimension that affects best practices is which phase of...

Experience gained in building a model to solve one problem doesn’t always transfer to building models for other problems. How can you tell whether or not intuitions honed in one project are likely to generalize to another?

Last Wednesday, the U.S. Capitol building was overrun by insurrectionists at the moment when members of Congress were certifying the results of a national election. Reading accounts of how close the mob came to where those representatives had sheltered...

In my letter last week, I alluded to the way AI tends to concentrate power and wealth. This tendency worries me, and I believe it deserves more attention.

Happy New Year! As we enter 2021, I want to share with you three wishes I have for AI in the upcoming year. I hope we can: Narrow the gap between proofs-of-concept and production. While building good models is important...

Every year for the past decade, I flew to Singapore or Hong Kong to celebrate my mother’s birthday with her on December 22. This year, for the first time, we did it via Zoom.

When a researcher works for a company, what rights should they have to publish their work, and what rights should the company that sponsored the work have? This issue has come up many times in the AI community across many companies...

Like many people in the AI community, I am saddened by the sudden departure from Google of ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru. Timnit is a tireless champion of diversity and fairness in AI.

The rise of AI creates opportunities for new startups that can move humanity forward. In the 1990s, the internet was embraced successfully by incumbent companies including Apple and Microsoft, but it also inspired hugely impactful...

Over the last two weeks, I described the importance of clean, consistent labels and how to use human-level performance (HLP) to trigger a review of whether labeling instructions need to be reviewed.

Last week, I wrote about the limitation of using human-level performance (HLP) as a metric to beat in machine learning applications for manufacturing and other fields. In this letter, I would like to show why beating HLP isn’t always the best way to improve performance.