Letters from Andrew Ng

Personal messages to the AI community

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Letters

Short of Time to Build With AI? Simplify Your Projects: Scale down your AI projects into something you can execute quickly. Then collect feedback from users to sharpen your ideas.

I’d like to share a tip for getting more practice building with AI — that is, either using AI building blocks to build applications or using AI coding assistance to create powerful applications quickly.
Court document excerpt supporting fair use of copyrighted books to train LLMs, comparing it to teaching children to write.
Letters

A Major Risk to AI Development Just Decreased: A U.S. federal judge ruled that training LLMs on copyrighted works is fair use. AI models are free to learn from books just like people are.

On Monday, a United States District Court ruled that training LLMs on copyrighted books constitutes fair use.
H1B visa approval notice from USCIS for Stanford University, dated July 11, 2005, valid from September 2005 to August 2006.
Letters

High-Skilled Immigration and International Students Are Good For the U.S. — And the World: Making H1-B and F-1 visas more difficult to get harms U.S. competitiveness in AI and innovation worldwide.

One of the most effective things the U.S. or any other nation can do to ensure its competitiveness in AI is to welcome high-skilled immigration and international students who have the potential to become high-skilled.
Colorful LEGO bricks labeled for AI concepts: prompting, agentic, guardrails, evals, RAG, fine-tuning, computer use, async programming.
Letters

Meet The New Breed of GenAI Application Engineers: A new breed of software engineers is building more powerful applications faster than ever, thanks to generative AI. Here’s how to identify them in job interviews.

There’s a new breed of GenAI Application Engineers who can build more-powerful applications faster than was possible before, thanks to generative AI.
Robots building a wooden house frame under sunny sky. Teamwork, technology, and construction. Future automation in construction.
Letters

How AI Fund Is Building AI Builders: AI-enabled coding empowers anyone build software that boosts productivity and makes life easier. Here’s now non-engineers at AI Fund are building apps for fun and profit.

Everyone can benefit by learning to code with AI! At AI Fund, the venture studio I lead, everyone — not just the engineers — can vibe code or use more sophisticated AI-assisted coding techniques.
Bar chart showing proposed 2026 U.S. science funding cuts vs. 2025 for agencies like USFS, NSF, NASA, and DoE.
Letters

Cut Research Funding, Weaken the Nation: Open scientific research makes the U.S. stronger. Cutting funding risks national competitiveness and security.

I am alarmed by the proposed cuts to U.S. funding for basic research, analyzed here, and the impact this would have for U.S. competitiveness in AI and other areas.
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.
Blue performance gauge with needle pointing to maximum, indicating high level or peak performance.
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.
Black toddler sneakers with white soles on wooden floor, featuring Velcro strap and soft inner lining for comfort.
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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