Letters from Andrew Ng

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

AI’s usefulness in a wide variety of applications creates many opportunities for entrepreneurship.

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others,” said Winston Churchill.

On Father’s Day last weekend, I sat with my daughter to help her practice solving arithmetic problems.

Last week, I attended the World Economic Forum, an annual meeting of leaders in government, business, and culture at Davos, Switzerland.

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.

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.

Over the weekend, Hamas launched a surprise terrorist attack on Israel, slaughtering and kidnapping civilians. The images in the media are horrifying, and over 1,000 people...

While AI is a general-purpose technology that’s useful for many things, it isn’t good for every task under the sun. How can we decide which concrete use cases to build? If you’re helping a business figure out where to apply AI, I’ve found the following recipe useful as a brainstorming aid…

Do large language models understand the world? As a scientist and engineer, I’ve avoided asking whether an AI system “understands” anything. There’s no widely agreed-upon, scientific test for whether a system really understands — as opposed to appearing to understand —

Suddenly it seems like everyone wants to regulate AI. The European Union is on the verge of enacting a comprehensive AI Act that’s intended to mitigate risks and protect individual rights. In the United States, Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer foresees legislation possibly within months.

Last week, safe.org asserted that “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.

An ill-advised proposal for a 6-month pause in cutting-edge AI research got far more attention than I think it deserved. To me, this is a wake-up call that the AI doomers have done a much better job than the AI optimists at framing the narrative of progress in AI.

AI has an Instagram problem. Just as Instagram’s parade of perfect physiques makes many people feel they don’t measure up, AI’s parade of exciting projects makes many people feel their own projects are lacking.

The population of Earth officially reached 8 billion this week. Hooray! It’s hard to imagine what so many people are up to. While I hope that humanity can learn how to leave only gentle footprints on the planet, I’m excited about the creativity and inventiveness that a growing human population...