Santa Clara County's I Voted sticker
Letters

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.
Illustration of a Halloween pumpking on a book
Letters

Happy Halloween! An Alternative AI Glossary

Welcome to this special Halloween issue of The Batch! In AI, we use many challenging technical terms. To help you keep things straight, I would like to offer some definitions that I definitely would not use.
LandingLens platform
Letters

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.
Andrew Ng's father Ronald Ng playing the violin
Letters

The Joy and Value of Life-Long Learning

My father recently celebrated a milestone: He has completed 146 online courses since 2012. His studies have spanned topics from creative writing to complexity theory. Ronald Ng is a great example of lifelong learning.
Balance with the word "present" down and the word "future" up
Letters

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?
Online panel discussion on “GANs for Good” with Andrew Ng, Anima Anandkumar, Alexei Efros, Ian Goodfellow, and Sharon Zhou
Letters

Introducing the Generative Adversarial Networks Specialization

This special issue of The Batch celebrates the launch of our new Generative Adversarial Networks Specialization! GANs are among the most exciting technologies to emerge from deep learning.
Dishwasher robot placing a plate
Letters

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.
Man riding a bike and reading a book at the same time
Letters

How to Learn Coding

I’d like to share a programming tip that I’ve used for years. A large part of programming involves googling for code snippets you need on Stack Overflow and other websites. (Shh. Don’t tell the nondevelopers. ????)
Hawaiian Pizza
Letters

Coding AI is the New Literacy

Today we take it for granted that many people know how to read and write. Someday, I hope, it will be just as common that people know how to write code. Several hundred years ago, society didn’t view language literacy as a necessary skill.
Light on a window during a very dark night
Letters

How to Build Deep Expertise

Did you ever spend days obsessing over a technical problem? If so, I applaud you. Determined pursuit of solutions to hard problems is an important step toward building deep expertise.
Letter and number-shaped stickers on the wall
Letters

Learning for Humans, Learning for Machines

I’ve been trying to teach my toddler the alphabet. Despite having some educational experience, when she mispronounces a vowel for the nth time, I can’t help but feel like I’m doing it wrong.
Top view of putting hands on each other
Letters

Values for the AI Community, Part 2: Readers Respond

Last week, I asked what values the AI community stands for. Thank you to everyone who replied! The email responses in aggregate ran to 55 pages of text, and I enjoyed reading all of them.
Andrew Ng's tweet from Aug 2, 2020
Letters

Values for the AI Community

Earlier this week, I asked a question on social media: What is the most important problem that the AI community should work on? Thousands of you responded. The most frequently mentioned themes included...
Andrew Ng speaking at the National Intergovernmental Audit Forum about auditing AI systems
Letters

Making AI Fair, Accountable, and Reliable

I spoke last week at the National Intergovernmental Audit Forum, a meeting attended by U.S. federal, state, and local government auditors. (Apparently some of the organizers had taken AI for Everyone.)
Zoom call with the Ng family celebrating Andrew Ng's grandfather’s 102nd birthday
Letters

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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