The Batch

Letters from Andrew Ng

Personal messages to the AI community

Two people reading in bed, one with a book on library functions and a head labeled with AI layers.
Letters

AI Is Part of Your Online Audience: Some webpages are written not for humans but for large language models to read. Developers can benefit by keeping the LLM audience in mind.

A small number of people are posting text online that’s intended for direct consumption not by humans, but by LLMs (large language models).
Man with tools says, “I optimized for tool use!” Woman at computer replies, “Should’ve optimized for computer use!”
Letters

From Optimizing for People to Optimizing for Machines: Why large language models are increasingly fine-tuned to fit into agentic workflows

Large language models (LLMs) are typically optimized to answer peoples’ questions.
Robot using a megaphone to amplify its message, with smaller robots spreading out from the megaphone.
Letters

Social Media Bots and the Amplification Effect: Software bots that engage with certain social media posts likely play a role in manipulating public opinion. We need better algorithms to distinguish fake from real engagement.

Trump and the Republican party chalked up huge wins this week. Did manipulation of social media by generative AI play any role in this election?
Man pulls lever to electrify a robot maid holding cleaning tools, cartoon-style.
Letters

The Psychology of AI Doom: Why do people who are well informed about AI worry about unrealistic dangers? There are incentives for doomsaying.

Welcome to our special Halloween issue of The Batch, in which we probe fears, anomalies, and shadows of AI.
Two cheetahs in a savannah, with one saying ‘Move fast and be responsible!’ in a speech bubble.
Letters

How to Get User Feedback to Your AI Products - Fast!: Your ability to prototype AI capabilities fast affects all parts of the product development cycle, starting with getting user feedback.

Startups live or die by their ability to execute at speed. For large companies, too, the speed with which an innovation team is able to iterate has a huge impact on its odds of success.
Graph showing global warming with and without aerosol injection.
Letters

To Fight Climate Change, It's Time to Consider Geoengineering: Hurricanes Helene and Milton took hundreds of lives, not to mention other disasters driven by climate change. Stratospheric aerosol injection could save countless lives.

To Fight Climate Change, It's Time to Consider Geoengineering
Three people, Jeff Dean, Andrew Ng, and Geoff Hinton, stand together at Hinton’s retirement party.
Letters

Nobel Prizes for AI!: Nobel committees for physics and chemistry honored AI researchers. How can the AI community itself can celebrate the next generation of innovators?

Congratulations to Geoff Hinton and John Hopfield for winning the 2024 Physics Nobel Prize!
California Senate Bill 1047 with a large veto stamp on top of the document.
Letters

A Victory for Innovation and Open Source: California’s governor vetoed SB 1047, which would have hurt innovation without making anyone safer. Now let’s work on mitigating AI’s real risks and realizing its potential benefits.

We won! California’s anti-innovation bill SB 1047 was vetoed by Governor Newsom over the weekend.
Coursera Connect event in Las Vegas, September 2024, featuring Andrew Ng and Coursera executives during panel discussions.
Letters

AI Innovations for Learners: How generative AI is changing education

Last week I spoke at Coursera Connect, the company’s annual conference in Las Vegas, where a major topic was AI and education.
Diagram of the data engineering cycle from generation to ingestion and transformation to analytics and machine learning.
Letters

Our New Specialization, the Data Engineering Professional Certificate!: Engineers who can build systems to manage data are in high demand. The Data Engineering Professional Certificate will make you job-ready.

Years ago, when I was working at a large tech company, I was responsible for the data warehouse...
Comic where a robot is hiding in a closet during a game of hide-and-seek.
Letters

Why Science-Fiction Scenarios of AI’s Emergent Behavior Are Likely to Remain Fictional: The sudden apparance of “emergent” AI capabilities may be an artifact of the metrics you study

Over the weekend, my two kids colluded in a hilariously bad attempt to mislead me to look in the wrong place during a game of hide-and-seek.
NG YEOL
Letters

An Asian AI Hub-in-the-Making: South Korea is well positioned to become a strong AI hub

Recently I visited South Korea, where I spoke at length about AI with President Yoon Suk Yeol. Based on what I saw there in government, business, and academia, the nation is well positioned to become a strong AI hub.
A graph of model pricing for GPT-4 and Llama 3.1. GPT-4 in March cost $36 per million tokens, GPT-4 Turbo $14, GPT-4o $7.
Letters

Falling LLM Token Prices and What They Mean for AI Companies: The price of using large language models like GPT-4 is falling dramatically. Here’s how AI companies can capitalize on the trend.

After a recent price reduction by OpenAI, GPT-4o tokens now cost $4 per million tokens (using a blended rate that assumes 80% input and 20% output tokens).
Regulate AI Applications, Not Technology: Why the DEFIANCE Act and FTC ban on fake product reviews take the right approach to regulating AI.
Letters

Regulate AI Applications, Not Technology: Why the DEFIANCE Act and FTC ban on fake product reviews take the right approach to regulating AI.

I’m encouraged at the progress of the U.S. government at moving to stem harmful AI applications.
Thailand’s AI Push: How countries that aren’t AI hotspots will benefit from AI advances
Letters

Thailand’s AI Push: How countries that aren’t AI hotspots will benefit from AI advances

When entrepreneurs build a startup, it is often their speed and momentum that gives them a shot at competing with the tech behemoths. This is true of countries as well.

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