The Batch

Letters from Andrew Ng

Personal messages to the AI community

Two cheetahs in a savannah, with one saying ‘Move fast and be responsible!’ in a speech bubble.
Letters

How to Get User Feedback to Your AI Products - Fast!: Your ability to prototype AI capabilities fast affects all parts of the product development cycle, starting with getting user feedback.

Startups live or die by their ability to execute at speed. For large companies, too, the speed with which an innovation team is able to iterate has a huge impact on its odds of success.
Graph showing global warming with and without aerosol injection.
Letters

To Fight Climate Change, It's Time to Consider Geoengineering: Hurricanes Helene and Milton took hundreds of lives, not to mention other disasters driven by climate change. Stratospheric aerosol injection could save countless lives.

To Fight Climate Change, It's Time to Consider Geoengineering
Three people, Jeff Dean, Andrew Ng, and Geoff Hinton, stand together at Hinton’s retirement party.
Letters

Nobel Prizes for AI!: Nobel committees for physics and chemistry honored AI researchers. How can the AI community itself can celebrate the next generation of innovators?

Congratulations to Geoff Hinton and John Hopfield for winning the 2024 Physics Nobel Prize!
California Senate Bill 1047 with a large veto stamp on top of the document.
Letters

A Victory for Innovation and Open Source: California’s governor vetoed SB 1047, which would have hurt innovation without making anyone safer. Now let’s work on mitigating AI’s real risks and realizing its potential benefits.

We won! California’s anti-innovation bill SB 1047 was vetoed by Governor Newsom over the weekend.
Coursera Connect event in Las Vegas, September 2024, featuring Andrew Ng and Coursera executives during panel discussions.
Letters

AI Innovations for Learners: How generative AI is changing education

Last week I spoke at Coursera Connect, the company’s annual conference in Las Vegas, where a major topic was AI and education.
Diagram of the data engineering cycle from generation to ingestion and transformation to analytics and machine learning.
Letters

Our New Specialization, the Data Engineering Professional Certificate!: Engineers who can build systems to manage data are in high demand. The Data Engineering Professional Certificate will make you job-ready.

Years ago, when I was working at a large tech company, I was responsible for the data warehouse...
Comic where a robot is hiding in a closet during a game of hide-and-seek.
Letters

Why Science-Fiction Scenarios of AI’s Emergent Behavior Are Likely to Remain Fictional: The sudden apparance of “emergent” AI capabilities may be an artifact of the metrics you study

Over the weekend, my two kids colluded in a hilariously bad attempt to mislead me to look in the wrong place during a game of hide-and-seek.
NG YEOL
Letters

An Asian AI Hub-in-the-Making: South Korea is well positioned to become a strong AI hub

Recently I visited South Korea, where I spoke at length about AI with President Yoon Suk Yeol. Based on what I saw there in government, business, and academia, the nation is well positioned to become a strong AI hub.
A graph of model pricing for GPT-4 and Llama 3.1. GPT-4 in March cost $36 per million tokens, GPT-4 Turbo $14, GPT-4o $7.
Letters

Falling LLM Token Prices and What They Mean for AI Companies: The price of using large language models like GPT-4 is falling dramatically. Here’s how AI companies can capitalize on the trend.

After a recent price reduction by OpenAI, GPT-4o tokens now cost $4 per million tokens (using a blended rate that assumes 80% input and 20% output tokens).
Regulate AI Applications, Not Technology: Why the DEFIANCE Act and FTC ban on fake product reviews take the right approach to regulating AI.
Letters

Regulate AI Applications, Not Technology: Why the DEFIANCE Act and FTC ban on fake product reviews take the right approach to regulating AI.

I’m encouraged at the progress of the U.S. government at moving to stem harmful AI applications.
Thailand’s AI Push: How countries that aren’t AI hotspots will benefit from AI advances
Letters

Thailand’s AI Push: How countries that aren’t AI hotspots will benefit from AI advances

When entrepreneurs build a startup, it is often their speed and momentum that gives them a shot at competing with the tech behemoths. This is true of countries as well.
Learning to Code is Easier Than Ever!: Our “AI Python for Beginners” courses use an AI coding assistant to teach programming in a way that’s aligned with where the field is going rather than where it has been.
Letters

Learning to Code is Easier Than Ever!: Our “AI Python for Beginners” courses use an AI coding assistant to teach programming in a way that’s aligned with where the field is going rather than where it has been.

I’m delighted to announce AI Python for Beginners, a sequence of free short courses that teach anyone to code, regardless of background.
How to Brainstorm AI Startup Ideas: Best practices for brainstorming, evaluating, and prioritizing great ideas for AI startups and products
Letters

How to Brainstorm AI Startup Ideas: Best practices for brainstorming, evaluating, and prioritizing great ideas for AI startups and products

Last week, I wrote about why working on a concrete startup or project idea — meaning a specific product envisioned in enough detail that we can build it for a specific target user
Concrete Ideas Make Strong AI Startups: AI startups can move more efficiently and effectively with a concrete product idea than a vague market concept.
Letters

Concrete Ideas Make Strong AI Startups: AI startups can move more efficiently and effectively with a concrete product idea than a vague market concept.

AI’s usefulness in a wide variety of applications creates many opportunities for entrepreneurship.
A graphic of a hand placing a ballot into a box labeled "Vote."
Letters

Threats to Democracy and How AI Can Help: Democracy empowers each citizen to help decide who governs.

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

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