Job search pillar and two guys talking and drinking coffee
Letters

How to Build a Career in AI, Part 6: Job Search Fundamentals

Last week, I wrote about switching roles, industries, or both as a framework for considering a job search. If you’re preparing to switch roles or industries, there’s a lot about your target job that you probably don’t know.
An illustration shows how career changes can be a role switch, an industry switch, or both.
Letters

How to Build a Career in AI, Part 5: Finding Your First AI Job

Andrew Ng presents a framework for job seekers in AI, especially those entering from a different field.
A statue of Lady Justice holds a set of scales in each hand, signifying inconsistent decision making.
Letters

Toward More Consistent Decision-Making

Andrew Ng considers how inconsistent human decisions are, and how AI can reduce that inconsistency.
Vehicle avoiding traffic cones
Letters

The Trouble With Reinforcement Learning

While working on Course 3 of the Machine Learning Specialization, which covers reinforcement learning, I was reflecting on how reinforcement learning algorithms are still quite finicky.
Data scrapping tweak
Letters

More Data for AI Developers: A New Law Makes it Easier to Scrape the Web

Many AI systems have been built using data scraped from the internet. Indeed, even the cornerstone dataset for computer vision research, ImageNet, was built using images taken from the public internet.
An illustration of a person thinking about his projects pillar
Letters

How to Build a Career in AI, Part 4: How to Sequence Projects to Build a Career

Last week’s letter focused on coming up with AI project ideas, part of a series on how to build a career in the field. This letter describes how a sequence of projects might fit into your career path.
A person holding a giant sheet with tips on how to find projects
Letters

How to Build a Career in AI, Part 3: Choosing Projects

In the last two letters, I wrote about developing a career in AI and shared tips for gaining technical skills. This time, I’d like to discuss an important step in building a career: project work.
An illustration of a person holding a giant sheet with different ML subjects
Letters

How to Build a Career in AI, Part 2: Learning Technical Skills

Last week, I wrote about key steps for building a career in AI: learning technical skills, doing project work, and searching for a job, all of which is supported by being part of a community. In this letter, I’d like to dive more deeply into the first...
An illustration of a person on top of a career path
Letters

How to Build a Career in AI, Part 1: Three Steps to Career Growth

The rapid rise of AI has led to a rapid rise in AI jobs, and many people are building exciting careers in this field. A career is a decades-long journey, and the path is not always straightforward.
People Hugging
Letters

How to Keep the AI Community Growing

Many things in life have a positive side and a negative side. For instance, a new AI system might help democratize access, and at the same time it might be more accessible to people who have internet access than those who don’t.
Microscope and Plato's head statue
Letters

Can an AI System Be Sentient? Ask a Philosopher

A Google Engineer recently announced he believes that a language model is sentient. I’m highly skeptical that any of today’s AI models are sentient. Some reporters, to their credit, also expressed skepticism.
U.S. Three-Month Treasury Bill Secondary Market Interest Rate, Discount Basis
Letters

What Rising Interest Rates Mean for AI, Part 2: Why It Still Makes Sense to Forge Ahead

Last week, I wrote about how rising interest rates are likely to lead investors and other finance professionals to focus on short-term returns rather than longer-term investments.
US federal funds effective interest rate
Letters

What Rising Interest Rates Mean for AI, Part 1: What's Likely to Happen

The United States Federal Reserve Bank has signaled that it will continue to raise interest rates. As one consequence, the stock market is significantly down, particularly tech stocks, relative to the beginning of the year.
An illustration of Andrew Ng thinking looking at Neural Networks
Letters

A Solid Foundation for a Rewarding Career

Years ago, I had to choose between a neural network and a decision tree learning algorithm. It was necessary to pick an efficient one, because we planned to apply the algorithm to a very large set of users on a limited compute budget.
Blue balloon on nails in a light pink background
Letters

How to Build AI Startups Part 3: Set Customer Expectations!

One of the challenges of building an AI startup is setting customer expectations. Machine learning is a highly experiment-driven field. Until you’ve built something, it’s hard to predict how well it will work.

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