The Batch
Illustration of a Python inside a cardboard box
Letters

The Python Package Problem: Python packages can give your software superpowers, but managing them is a barrier to AI development.

I think the complexity of Python package management holds down AI application development more than is widely appreciated. AI faces multiple bottlenecks — we need more GPUs, better algorithms, cleaner data in large quantities.
Three Themes for AI Entrepreneurs: Starting an AI company? Three keys to AI entrepreneurship emerged at AI Fund’s annual co-founder and CEO summit.
Letters

Three Themes for AI Entrepreneurs: Starting an AI company? Three keys to AI entrepreneurship emerged at AI Fund’s annual co-founder and CEO summit.

Earlier this month, my team AI Fund held its annual co-founder and CEO summit, where many of our collaborators gathered in California for two days to discuss how to build AI companies.
How to Think About the Privacy of Cloud-Based AI: How private is your data on cloud-based AI platforms? Here's a framework for evaluating risks.
Letters

How to Think About the Privacy of Cloud-Based AI: How private is your data on cloud-based AI platforms? Here's a framework for evaluating risks.

The rise of cloud-hosted AI software has brought much discussion about the privacy implications of using it. But I find that users, including both consumers and developers building on such software
What If Large Language Models Become a Commodity?: Large language models are proliferating. What are the prospects for Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and LLM startups?
Letters

What If Large Language Models Become a Commodity?: Large language models are proliferating. What are the prospects for Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and LLM startups?

On the LMSYS Chatbot Arena Leaderboard, which pits chatbots against each other anonymously and prompts users to judge which one generated a better answer...
The World Needs More Intelligence: Human intelligence is expensive, artificial intelligence is cheap. To solve big problems like climate change, it makes sense to double down on AI.
Letters

The World Needs More Intelligence: Human intelligence is expensive, artificial intelligence is cheap. To solve big problems like climate change, it makes sense to double down on AI.

Last year, a number of large businesses and individuals went to the media and governments and pushed the message that AI is scary, impossible to control, and might even lead to human extinction. Unfortunately they succeeded: Now many people think AI is scary.
World Economic Forum, January 16, 2024: "The Expanding Universe of Generative Models" panelists
Letters

AI On the Agenda at the World Economic Forum: The World Economic Forum at Davos felt like an AI conference, with big takeaways for business and regulation.

Last week, I attended the World Economic Forum, an annual meeting of leaders in government, business, and culture at Davos, Switzerland.
The Easiest Way to Achieve Artificial General Intelligence: Coming up with scientific definitions of ambiguous terms like consciousness and sentience can spur progress but mislead the public.
Letters

The Easiest Way to Achieve Artificial General Intelligence: Coming up with scientific definitions of ambiguous terms like consciousness and sentience can spur progress but mislead the public.

As I wrote in an earlier letter, whether AI is sentient or conscious is a philosophical question rather than a scientific one, since there is no widely agreed-upon definition and test for these terms.
Outstanding Research Without Massive Compute: Researchers at Stanford and Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Network dramatically simplified a key algorithm for training large language models.
Letters

Outstanding Research Without Massive Compute: Researchers at Stanford and Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Network dramatically simplified a key algorithm for training large language models.

It is only rarely that, after reading a research paper, I feel like giving the authors a standing ovation. But I felt that way after finishing Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) by...
The New York Times versus OpenAI and Microsoft: The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, but the real issues and harms are not clear.
Letters

The New York Times versus OpenAI and Microsoft: The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, but the real issues and harms are not clear.

Last week, the New York Times (NYT) filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging massive copyright infringements. The suit claims, among other things, that OpenAI and Microsoft used millions of copyrighted NYT articles to train their models...
Andrew Ng holding a computer while sitting next to a chimney
Letters

What Will Change — And What Will Stay the Same: Change is hard to predict, so invest your time and energy in things that aren't likely to change.

AI is progressing faster than ever. This is thrilling, yet rapid change can be disorienting. In such times, it’s useful to follow Jeff Bezos’ advice to think about not only what is changing but also what will stay the same.
The View From NeurIPS 2023: NeurIPS 2023 was chockablock with generative AI, large multimodal models, autonomous agents — and anxiety about the pace of development.
Letters

The View From NeurIPS 2023: NeurIPS 2023 was chockablock with generative AI, large multimodal models, autonomous agents — and anxiety about the pace of development.

Last week, I attended the NeurIPS conference in New Orleans. It was fun to catch up with old friends, make new ones, and also get a wide scan of current AI research.
AI Doomsday Scenarios and How to Guard Against Them: AI could help an evildoer perpetrate a bioweapon attack. Here's what we can do about it.
Letters

AI Doomsday Scenarios and How to Guard Against Them: AI could help an evildoer perpetrate a bioweapon attack. Here's what we can do about it.

Last week, I participated in the United States Senate’s Insight Forum on Artificial Intelligence to discuss “Risk, Alignment, & Guarding Against Doomsday Scenarios.”
Making Large Vision Models Work for Business: Large language models can learn what they need to know from the internet, but large vision models need training on proprietary data.
Letters

Making Large Vision Models Work for Business: Large language models can learn what they need to know from the internet, but large vision models need training on proprietary data.

Large language models, or LLMs, have transformed how we process text. Large vision models, or LVMs, are starting to change how we process images as well. But there is an important difference between LLMs and LVMs.
An Expanding Universe of Large Language Models: From ChatGPT to the open source GPT4All, the bounty of large language models means opportunities for users and developers alike.
Letters

An Expanding Universe of Large Language Models: From ChatGPT to the open source GPT4All, the bounty of large language models means opportunities for users and developers alike.

One year since the launch of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, it’s amazing how many large language models are available.  A year ago, ChatGPT was pretty much the only game in town for consumers (using a web user interface) who wanted to use a large language model (LLM)...
What's Next for OpenAI: The abrupt firing and reinstatement of OpenAI CEO Sam Alman leaves impacts both hopeful and worrisome.
Letters

What's Next for OpenAI: The abrupt firing and reinstatement of OpenAI CEO Sam Alman leaves impacts both hopeful and worrisome.

I’m delighted that the crisis at OpenAI, which you can read about below, seems to have been resolved with an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return as CEO after his sudden firing last week.

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