The Batch
Generative AI = Huge Opportunities: Businesses, governments, and investors worldwide want to take advantage of generative AI. Developers, it's your time to shine!
Letters

Generative AI = Huge Opportunities: Businesses, governments, and investors worldwide want to take advantage of generative AI. Developers, it's your time to shine!

Last week, I returned home from Asia, where I spoke at Seoul National University in Korea, the National University of Singapore, and the University of Tokyo in Japan and visited many businesses.
Bravo to AI Companies That Agreed to Voluntary Commitments! Now Let's See Action: The commitment by major AI companies to develop watermarks to identify AI-generated output is a test of the voluntary approach to regulation.
Letters

Bravo to AI Companies That Agreed to Voluntary Commitments! Now Let's See Action: The commitment by major AI companies to develop watermarks to identify AI-generated output is a test of the voluntary approach to regulation.

Last week, the White House announced voluntary commitments by seven AI companies. Most of the points were sufficiently vague that it seems easy for the White House...
It's Time to Update Copyright for Generative AI: We need new copyright laws that enable generative AI developers and users to move forward without risking lawsuits.
Letters

It's Time to Update Copyright for Generative AI: We need new copyright laws that enable generative AI developers and users to move forward without risking lawsuits.

Many laws will need to be updated to encourage beneficial AI innovations while mitigating potential harms. One example: Copyright law as it relates to generative AI is a mess!
Building Machine Learning Systems is More Debugging Than Development: Traditional software development requires meticulous planning. With machine learning, it's better to jump right in.
Letters

Building Machine Learning Systems is More Debugging Than Development: Traditional software development requires meticulous planning. With machine learning, it's better to jump right in.

Internalizing this mental framework has made me a more efficient machine learning engineer: Most of the work of building a machine learning system is debugging rather than development.
AI at the Speed of Prompting: Prompt-based development enables you to try out ideas quickly and cheaply — no need to scope projects carefully.
Letters

AI at the Speed of Prompting: Prompt-based development enables you to try out ideas quickly and cheaply — no need to scope projects carefully.

Prompt-based development is making the machine learning development cycle much faster: Projects that used to take months now may take days. I wrote in an earlier letter that this rapid development is causing developers to do away with test sets.
What Lawmakers Need to Know About AI: Few people in the world have the information required to regulate AI effectively. Governments need to get it.
Letters

What Lawmakers Need to Know About AI: Few people in the world have the information required to regulate AI effectively. Governments need to get it.

Suddenly it seems like everyone wants to regulate AI. The European Union is on the verge of enacting a comprehensive AI Act that’s intended to mitigate risks and protect individual rights. In the United States, Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer foresees legislation possibly within months.
Breakthroughs on the Horizon?: Innovations in computer vision stole the spotlight at this year's CVPR conference.
Letters

Breakthroughs on the Horizon?: Innovations in computer vision stole the spotlight at this year's CVPR conference.

I spent Sunday through Tuesday at the CVPR computer vision conference in Vancouver, Canada, along with over 4,000 other attendees. With the easing of the pandemic, it’s fantastic that large conferences are being held in person again!
AI Risk and the Resource Curse: Concentration of AI in the hands of a few could undermine human rights. The solution is to make it available to everyone.
Letters

AI Risk and the Resource Curse: Concentration of AI in the hands of a few could undermine human rights. The solution is to make it available to everyone.

AI risks are in the air — from speculation that AI, decades or centuries from now, could bring about human extinction to ongoing problems like bias and fairness.
Existential Risk? I Don't Get It!: Prominent computer scientists fear that AI could trigger human extinction. It's time to have a real conversation about the realistic risks.
Letters

Existential Risk? I Don't Get It!: Prominent computer scientists fear that AI could trigger human extinction. It's time to have a real conversation about the realistic risks.

Last week, safe.org asserted that “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.
Three New Courses!: Check out our short courses on Building Systems with the ChatGPT API, LangChain for LLM Application Development, and How Diffusion Models Work.
Letters

Three New Courses!: Check out our short courses on Building Systems with the ChatGPT API, LangChain for LLM Application Development, and How Diffusion Models Work.

In April, DeepLearning.AI launched a short course, “ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers,” taught by OpenAI’s Isa Fulford and me. I’m thrilled to announce three more short courses, available today.
Building AI Systems No Longer Requires Much Data: Pretrained models make it possible to build AI systems using very little additional data.
Letters

Building AI Systems No Longer Requires Much Data: Pretrained models make it possible to build AI systems using very little additional data.

It’s time to move beyond the stereotype that machine learning systems need a lot of data. While having more data is helpful, large pretrained models make it practical to build viable systems using a very small labeled training set — perhaps just a handful of examples specific to your application.
Beyond Test Sets: How prompting is changing machine learning development
Letters

Beyond Test Sets: How prompting is changing machine learning development

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my team at Landing AI’s work on visual prompting. With the speed of building machine learning applications through text prompting and visual prompting, I’m...
Doing Business with Chatbots: Companies might be overestimating how much it costs to run LLM-based applications.
Letters

Doing Business with Chatbots: Companies might be overestimating how much it costs to run LLM-based applications.

There are many great applications to be built on top of large language models, and the overhead of doing so may be lower than you think. Sometimes, I've spent all day on a weekend developing ideas only to find that I've spent less than $0.50.
New course — ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers: Learn how to use ChatGPT's API to build applications for text processing, robotic process automation, coaching, and more
Letters

New course — ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers: Learn how to use ChatGPT's API to build applications for text processing, robotic process automation, coaching, and more

Last week, we released a new course, ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers, created in collaboration with OpenAI. This short, 1.5-hour course is taught by OpenAI’s Isa Fulford and me.
"Visual Prompting” Builds Vision Models in Seconds: A new approach applies ideas from text prompting to computer vision
Letters

"Visual Prompting” Builds Vision Models in Seconds: A new approach applies ideas from text prompting to computer vision

My team at Landing AI just announced a new tool for quickly building computer vision models, using a technique we call Visual Prompting. It’s a lot of fun! I invite you to try it.

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