Letters from Andrew Ng

Personal messages to the AI community

Top left: attendees watch a presentation. Top right: crowd at a developer booth. Bottom left: fortune cookie says ‘Build baby build!’ Bottom right: staff check in attendees.
Letters

Lessons From Our First AI Dev Conference: How our learners began building their way to AI in everything at AI Dev 25 Tags: Letters, DeepLearning.AI News, Learning & Education

Last Friday on Pi Day, we held AI Dev 25, a new conference for AI Developers.
Illustration of a programmer at a computer displaying PyTorch code, while a smiling colleague gives a thumbs-up in approval.
Letters

Learn the Language of Software: AI won’t kill programming. There has never been a better time to start coding.

Some people today are discouraging others from learning programming on the grounds AI will automate it.
Diagram of an RQ-Transformer speech system with Helium and Depth Transformers for audio processing.
Letters

Wait Your Turn! Conversation by Voice Versus Text: Text interactions require taking turns, but voices may interrupt or overlap. Here’s how AI is evolving for voice interactions.

Continuing our discussion on the Voice Stack, I’d like to explore an area that today’s voice-based systems mostly struggle with: Voice Activity Detection (VAD) and the turn-taking paradigm of communication.
Diagram comparing direct audio generation with a foundation model vs. a voice pipeline using STT, LLM, and TTS.
Letters

What I’ve Learned Building Voice Applications: Best practices for building apps based on AI’s evolving voice-in, voice-out stack

The Voice Stack is improving rapidly. Systems that interact with users via speaking and listening will drive many new applications.
Thermal aerial image showing a suspect surrendering with hands raised. A marker highlights their location.
Letters

How AI Saved a Police Officer’s Life: A police drone located an officer under attack before it was too late. Get ready for many more stories like this.

Last month, a drone from Skyfire AI was credited with saving a police officer’s life after a dramatic 2 a.m. traffic stop.
“Responsible AI” written on a wall, with “Safety” crossed out in blue paint.
Letters

The Difference Between “AI Safety” and “Responsible AI”: Talk about “AI safety” obscures an important point; AI isn't inherently unsafe. Instead, let’s talk about “responsible AI.”

At the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris this week, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance said, “I’m not here to talk about AI safety.
Comic-style illustration of a confident woman and man standing beside bold ‘10X’ text on a bright background.
Letters

How AI can make you a 10x professional: Every profession can become more efficient and strategic by applying more intelligence.

A “10x engineer” — a widely accepted concept in tech — purportedly has 10 times the impact of the average engineer.
Three Takeaways from DeepSeek’s Big Week: Innvations by China’s AI powerhouse DeepSeek highlight major shifts in the international scene
Letters

Three Takeaways from DeepSeek’s Big Week: Innvations by China’s AI powerhouse DeepSeek highlight major shifts in the international scene

The buzz over DeepSeek this week crystallized, for many people, a few important trends that have been happening in plain sight.
Global temperature change map and graph comparing scenarios with and without SAI intervention.
Letters

How to Cool a Warming Planet: The only plausible path to keeping climate change in check is geoengineering.

Greetings from Davos, Switzerland! Many business and government leaders are gathered here again for the annual World Economic Forum to discuss tech, climate, geopolitics, and economic growth.
Two colleagues discuss their chatbot’s success; one suggests hiring an AI Product Manager.
Letters

AI Product Managers Will Be In-Demand: As the cost of building AI products falls, demand for people who know what to build will rise. Get ready for an explosion in AI Product Management!

Writing software, especially prototypes, is becoming cheaper. This will lead to increased demand for people who can decide what to build. AI Product Management has a bright future!
Illustration of tech tools like OpenAI, MongoDB, Heroku, and Python with Andrew Ng working on a laptop
Letters

My AI-Assisted Software Development Stack: The software development stack is evolving fast. Here are some things to consider as you choose components.

Using AI-assisted coding to build software prototypes is an important way to quickly explore many ideas and invent new things.
Andrew Ng celebrating and wishing a Happy New Year 2025 with sparklers.
Letters

New Opportunities for the New Year: AI-assisted coding lets you prototype applications quickly and easily. Go forth and build!

Despite having worked on AI since I was a teenager, I’m now more excited than ever about what we can do with it, especially in building AI applications.
Deer training class with sleigh diagrams on a chalkboard.
Letters

Think Technology is Moving Fast? Look at Applications!: AI technology progressed rapidly in 2024, but applications advanced even more quickly. Good regulation can make for even faster progress in 2025.

Is AI progressing rapidly? Yes! But while the progress of underlying AI technology has indeed sped up over the past 2 years, the fastest acceleration is in applications.
Graph showing cross-validation accuracy vs. number of features for raw and whitened inputs.
Letters

Focus on the Future, Learn From the Past: 15 years ago, the idea of scaling up deep learning was controversial — but it was right. Keep your eyes open for such ideas in 2025.

I’m thrilled that former students and postdocs of mine won both of this year’s NeurIPS Test of Time Paper Awards.
Cartoon showing people stuck in wet concrete, with a person saying ‘You asked for a concrete idea!’
Letters

Best Practices for AI Product Management: Generative AI is making it possible to build new kinds of applications in new ways. Here are emerging best practices for AI product managers.

AI Product Management is evolving rapidly. The growth of generative AI and AI-based developer tools has created numerous opportunities to build AI applications.

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