Slide with information about challenges to building AI products and businesses
Letters

Developing AI Products Part 1: How AI Product Development is Different From Traditional Software

With the rise of software engineering over several decades, many principles of how to build traditional software products and businesses are clear. But the principles of how to build AI products and businesses are still developing.
Data-Centric AI Competition slide
Letters

Ready, Set, Improve the Data!

I’m thrilled to announce the first data-centric AI competition! I invite you to participate.For decades, model-centric AI competitions, in which the dataset is held fixed while you iterate on the code, have driven our field forward.
Andrew Ng and his family on his graduation day
Letters

Congratulations to all the Graduates!

Around the world, students are graduating. If you’re one of them, or if someone close to you is graduating, congratulations!!! My family swapped pictures on WhatsApp recently and came across this one...
Photograph of a two-way road in the woods
Letters

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.
Conventional and data-centric benchmarks
Letters

Data-Centric AI Development: A New Kind of Benchmark

Benchmarks have been a significant driver of research progress in machine learning. But they've driven progress in model architecture, not approaches to building datasets, which can have a large impact on performance in practical applications.
Alert door widget
Letters

When Not to Use Machine Learning

I decided last weekend not to use a learning algorithm. Sometimes, a non-machine learning method works best.Now that my daughter is a little over two years old and highly mobile, I want to make sure the baby gate that keeps her away from the stairs is always shut.
Pictures of Robert Crowe, Andrew Ng and Laurence Moroney (from left to right)
Letters

Introducing the Machine Learning Engineering for Production (MLOps) Specialization

So you’ve trained an accurate neural network model in a Jupyter notebook. You should celebrate! But . . . now what? Machine learning engineering in production is an emerging discipline that helps individual engineers and teams put models into the hands of users.
Machine Learning project lifecycle
Letters

Data-Centric-AI Development: The Platform Approach

It can take 6 to 24 months to bring a machine learning project from concept to deployment, but a specialized development platform can make things go much faster.My team at Landing AI has been working on a platform called LandingLens for efficiently building computer vision models.
Iteration workflow
Letters

Data-Centric AI Development, Part 3: Limit Data Collection Time

How much data do you need to collect for a new machine learning project? If you’re working in a domain you’re familiar with, you may have a sense based on experience or from the literature.
Calendar pages flying away
Letters

Make Every Day Count

Last Sunday was my birthday. That got me thinking about the days leading to this one and those that may lie ahead.As a reader of The Batch, you’re probably pretty good at math. But let me ask you a question, and please answer from your gut, without calculating.
Lifecycle of an Machine Learning project
Letters

Iteration in AI Development

Machine learning development is highly iterative. Rather than designing a grand system, spending months to build it, and then launching it and hoping for the best, it’s usually better to build a quick-and-dirty system, get feedback...
Chart with percent trust in tech sector vs. business
Letters

Can Tech Regain the Public’s Trust?

Each year, the public relations agency Edelman produces a report on the online public’s trust in social institutions like government, media, and business. The latest Edelman Trust Barometer contains a worrisome finding...
Celebration of Coursera being a publicly listed company
Letters

Coursera Goes Public

I have a two-year-old daughter, and am expecting my son to be born later this week. When I think about what we can do to build a brighter future for our children, the most important thing is to create a foundation for education.
System explaining an AI system
Letters

Data-Centric AI Development, Part 2: A Critical Shift in Perspective

Earlier today, I spoke at a DeepLearning.AI event about MLOps, a field that aims to make building and deploying machine learning models more systematic. AI system development will move faster if we can shift from being model-centric to being data-centric.
Tents in the street
Letters

Privilege and Obligation

Over the past weekend, I happened to walk by a homeless encampment and went over to speak with some of the individuals there. I spoke with a homeless man who seemed to be partially speaking with me, and partially speaking with other people that I could not see.

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