Hot air balloons and rocket departing
Business Insights

How to Build AI Startups Part 1: Hard Tech

AI businesses differ from traditional software startups in important ways. For instance, technical feasibility isn’t always clear, product specification is complex, and data is necessary to train and test the system.
Twitter logo escaping from a cage
Business Insights

Should Twitter Publish Its Ranking Algorithm?

Last week, Elon Musk launched a surprise attempt to acquire Twitter. The $43-billion bid was motivated, he said, by his desire to protect free speech endangered by the company’s practice of promoting some tweets while burying others.
Darts board
Business Insights

Knowing When You Need Help

AI Fund, the venture studio and investment firm that I lead, recently held a summit where CEOs and founders of portfolio companies shared ideas on topics from fundraising to building team culture.
DeepLearning.AI group of learners with Andrew Ng
Business Insights

How to Advocate for AI in Your Organization

Last week, DeepLearning.AI invited a group of learners to our Palo Alto office’s courtyard. We had a good time chatting about paths into AI, career trajectories, applications people were working on, and challenges they were facing.
Andrew Ng speaking at the A3 Business Forum in Orlando, Florida
Business Insights

AI for Industrial Automation — and Beyond

I’m writing this in Orlando, Florida, where I just spoke at the A3 Business Forum, a group that works to advance industrial automation through AI, robotics, and other tools. This was my first large conference since the pandemic started...
Andrew Ng during a conference
Business Insights

How To Unlock AI Value

On Monday, Landing AI (where I’m CEO) announced the close of a $57 million Series A funding round. The investment enables the company to continue building its data-centric MLOps platform for computer vision, with a focus on manufacturing visual inspection.
Cartoon with a joke about choices
Business Insights

How to Build AI Products and Businesses: Two Strategies

Building AI products and businesses requires making tough choices about what to build and how to go about it. I’ve heard of two styles: Ready, Aim, Fire and Ready, Fire, Aim
Photograph of a two-way road in the woods
Business Insights

How to Make Tough Decisions

In school, most questions have only one right answer. But elsewhere, decisions often come down to a difficult choice among imperfect options. I’d like to share with you some approaches that have helped me make such decisions.
Many research papers
Business Insights

Rules for Corporate AI Researchers

When a researcher works for a company, what rights should they have to publish their work, and what rights should the company that sponsored the work have? This issue has come up many times in the AI community across many companies...
Light bulb on
Business Insights

Advice for Start-Up Founders

The rise of AI creates opportunities for new startups that can move humanity forward. In the 1990s, the internet was embraced successfully by incumbent companies including Apple and Microsoft, but it also inspired hugely impactful...
Santa Clara County's I Voted sticker
Business Insights

How to Think About Probabilities

As I write this letter, the vote count is underway in yesterday’s U.S. presidential election. The race has turned out to be tight. In their final forecast last night, the political analysts at fivethirtyeight.com suggested an 89 percent chance that Joe Biden would win.
LandingLens platform
Business Insights

The Rise of the Industrial AI Development Platform

Today Landing AI, where I am CEO, launched LandingLens, an AI-powered platform that helps manufacturers develop computer vision solutions that can identify defective products.
Balance with the word "present" down and the word "future" up
Business Insights

How to Manage Uncertainty

There’s a lot we don’t know about the future: When will a Covid-19 vaccine be available? Who will win the next election? Or in a business context, how many customers will we have next year?
Dishwasher robot placing a plate
Business Insights

How to Spot High-Impact Technologies

AI researchers keep coming up with impressive innovations: transformer-based language models, self-supervised learning, deep reinforcement learning, small data. All of these developments hold great promise.
Zoom call with the Ng family celebrating Andrew Ng's grandfather’s 102nd birthday
Business Insights

Global Communications and the New Normal

Over the weekend, my family celebrated my grandfather’s 102nd birthday on Zoom. We dialed in from Hong Kong (my grandfather), the U.S. (myself), the UK, Singapore, and New Zealand.

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