Letters from Andrew Ng

Personal messages to the AI community

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.
AI ecosystem layers: applications, orchestration, foundational models, cloud, and semiconductors.
Letters

The Falling Cost of Building AI Applications: Big AI’s huge investments in foundation models enables developers to build AI applications at very low cost.

There’s a lingering misconception that building with generative AI is expensive.
Cornucopia overflowing with fruits and vegetables.
Letters

Building a Better Future For All: Many people need help, and technology is the best way to help people at scale. Let’s get to work.

Happy Thanksgiving! In the United States, this is a week when many reflect on their blessings and give thanks.
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.

Subscribe to The Batch

Stay updated with weekly AI News and Insights delivered to your inbox