Letters from Andrew Ng

Personal messages to the AI community

Cartoon: Woman at desk; man in sandbox with shovel saying, "I'm experimenting!" in office setting.
Letters

How Large Companies Can Move Fast in AI: Enterprises can accelerate AI development in a sandbox environment that eliminates roadblocks while minimizing risks.

In the age of AI, large corporations — not just startups — can move fast. I often speak with large companies’ C-suite and Boards about AI strategy and implementation, and would like to share some ideas that are applicable to big companies.
Black stopwatch icon showing elapsed time, commonly used to represent speed, countdowns, or time tracking.
Letters

The Value of AI’s Speed Is Underrated: The value of AI-driven productivity is well recognized, but AI-driven speed can create growth, too.

AI’s ability to make tasks not just cheaper, but also faster, is underrated in its importance in creating business value.
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Letters

Hot Tips for Speedy Startups: Speed is the most important factor in successful startups. Here are four ways to accelerate your company.

I’m delighted to announce that AI Fund has closed $190M for our new fund, in an oversubscribed round.
Basketball 3-point shooting chart with AI-generated student portraits and stats for volume and accuracy.
Letters

The AI Revolution Comes to Grade-School Classrooms: Kira Learning is using AI to help teachers individualize computer-science education and address social-emotional needs.

I hope we can empower everyone to build with AI. Starting from K-12, we should teach every student AI enabled coding, since this will enable them to become more productive and more empowered adults.
Code snippet showing ‘Keep Building!’ printed in multiple programming languages including Python, Java, JavaScript, and C++.
Letters

How to Become a Multilingual Coder: AI makes it easy to code in any programming language — especially if you know just one.

Even though I’m a much better Python than JavaScript developer, with AI assistance, I’ve been writing a lot of JavaScript code recently.
Cartoon of two coworkers coding; one struggles with evaluations, the other iterates quickly through model updates and test cases.
Letters

We Iterate on Models. We Can Iterate on Evals, Too: Building automated evals doesn’t need to be a huge investment. Start with a few quick-and-dirty examples and iterate!

I’ve noticed that many GenAI application projects put in automated evaluations (evals) of the system’s output probably later — and rely on humans to manually examine and judge outputs longer — than they should.
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Letters

The Impact of U.S. Tariffs on AI: Broad tariffs will create challenges for AI and beyond, but I see a few silver linings. Here’s what’s in store.

I am so sorry that the U.S. is letting down our friends and allies.
Cartoon of a relaxed man saying “Relax! I’m lazy prompting!” while lounging under a beach umbrella near a stressed coworker at a desk.
Letters

The Benefits of Lazy Prompting: You don’t always need to provide context when prompting a large language model. A quick prompt can be enough.

Contrary to standard prompting advice that you should give LLMs the context they need to succeed, I find it’s sometimes faster to be lazy and dash off a quick, imprecise prompt and see what happens.
Cartoon of a man playing violin saying “I’m fine-tuning!” while a woman at her desk covers her ears, replying “Did you try prompting?”
Letters

When to Fine-Tune — and When Not To: Many teams that fine-tune their models would be better off prompting or using agentic workflows. Here's how to decide.

Fine-tuning small language models has been gaining traction over the past half year.
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Letters

Lessons From Our First AI Dev Conference: How our learners began building their way to AI in everything at AI Dev 25 Tags: Letters, DeepLearning.AI News, Learning & Education

Last Friday on Pi Day, we held AI Dev 25, a new conference for AI Developers.
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Letters

Learn the Language of Software: AI won’t kill programming. There has never been a better time to start coding.

Some people today are discouraging others from learning programming on the grounds AI will automate it.
Diagram of an RQ-Transformer speech system with Helium and Depth Transformers for audio processing.
Letters

Wait Your Turn! Conversation by Voice Versus Text: Text interactions require taking turns, but voices may interrupt or overlap. Here’s how AI is evolving for voice interactions.

Continuing our discussion on the Voice Stack, I’d like to explore an area that today’s voice-based systems mostly struggle with: Voice Activity Detection (VAD) and the turn-taking paradigm of communication.
Diagram comparing direct audio generation with a foundation model vs. a voice pipeline using STT, LLM, and TTS.
Letters

What I’ve Learned Building Voice Applications: Best practices for building apps based on AI’s evolving voice-in, voice-out stack

The Voice Stack is improving rapidly. Systems that interact with users via speaking and listening will drive many new applications.
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.

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