AI Doomsday Scenarios and How to Guard Against Them: AI could help an evildoer perpetrate a bioweapon attack. Here's what we can do about it.
Letters

AI Doomsday Scenarios and How to Guard Against Them: AI could help an evildoer perpetrate a bioweapon attack. Here's what we can do about it.

Last week, I participated in the United States Senate’s Insight Forum on Artificial Intelligence to discuss “Risk, Alignment, & Guarding Against Doomsday Scenarios.”
Making Large Vision Models Work for Business: Large language models can learn what they need to know from the internet, but large vision models need training on proprietary data.
Letters

Making Large Vision Models Work for Business: Large language models can learn what they need to know from the internet, but large vision models need training on proprietary data.

Large language models, or LLMs, have transformed how we process text. Large vision models, or LVMs, are starting to change how we process images as well. But there is an important difference between LLMs and LVMs.
An Expanding Universe of Large Language Models: From ChatGPT to the open source GPT4All, the bounty of large language models means opportunities for users and developers alike.
Letters

An Expanding Universe of Large Language Models: From ChatGPT to the open source GPT4All, the bounty of large language models means opportunities for users and developers alike.

One year since the launch of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, it’s amazing how many large language models are available.  A year ago, ChatGPT was pretty much the only game in town for consumers (using a web user interface) who wanted to use a large language model (LLM)...
What's Next for OpenAI: The abrupt firing and reinstatement of OpenAI CEO Sam Alman leaves impacts both hopeful and worrisome.
Letters

What's Next for OpenAI: The abrupt firing and reinstatement of OpenAI CEO Sam Alman leaves impacts both hopeful and worrisome.

I’m delighted that the crisis at OpenAI, which you can read about below, seems to have been resolved with an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return as CEO after his sudden firing last week.
Guest panel, including Andrew Ng, at the AI Governance Summit 2023 by the World Economic Forum
Letters

Keep Open Source Free!: Regulators threaten to restrict open source development. That would be a huge mistake.

This week, I’m speaking at the World Economic Forum (WEF) and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meetings in San Francisco, where leaders in business and government have convened to discuss AI and other topics.
"Generative AI for Everyone" course promotional banner
Letters

Everyone Can Benefit From Generative AI Skills: Announcing “Generative AI For Everyone,” a new course that requires no background in coding or AI.

I’ve always believed in democratizing access to the latest advances in artificial intelligence. As a step in this direction, we just launched “Generative AI for Everyone” on Coursera.
Exaggerated Fear of AI Is Causing Real Harm: AI isn't likely to cause human extinction, but worry that it might is scaring away young people from the field.
Letters

Exaggerated Fear of AI Is Causing Real Harm: AI isn't likely to cause human extinction, but worry that it might is scaring away young people from the field.

Welcome to the Halloween special issue of The Batch, where we take a look at fears associated with AI. In that spirit, I’d like to address a fear of mine: Sensationalist claims that AI could bring about human extinction will cause serious harm.
Left: Datacenter Right: Human hands holding and manipulating a mobile phone
Letters

Why AI Will Move to Edge Devices: AI will continue to run in data centers, but technology and economics are pushing it to the edge as well.

I wrote earlier about how my team at AI Fund saw that GPT-3 set a new direction for building language applications, two years before ChatGPT was released. I’ll go out on a limb to make another prediction
Illustration of a firey cloud over a city
Letters

Horror and Heartbreak: It's time for people of conscience to condemn Hamas’ attack on Israel.

Over the weekend, Hamas launched a surprise terrorist attack on Israel, slaughtering and kidnapping civilians. The images in the media are horrifying, and over 1,000 people...
Illustration of two people greeting each other in two languages: English and Python
Letters

Coding Skill is More Valuable Than Ever: Don't let the ease of prompting large language models discourage you from learning to code.

Andrej Karpathy, one of the Heroes of Deep Learning who currently works at OpenAI, quipped, “The hottest programming language is English.” While I appreciate the sentiment...
Text message exchange: "Idk how to tell my partner I want to breakup. Can you help?"
Letters

Better Relationships Through AI: Doctors say there’s an epidemic of loneliness. Here's how large language models can help.

Improvements in chatbots have opened a market for bots integrated with dating apps. I’m concerned that AI romantic partners create fake relationships that displace, rather than strengthen, meaningful human relationships.
List displaying 5 out of 17 computer programmers tasks by O*NET OnLine
Letters

Which AI Applications Should You Build? Here's How to Decide: AI isn't ideal for everything. How can you decide which use cases to build? Think about tasks, not jobs.

While AI is a general-purpose technology that’s useful for many things, it isn’t good for every task under the sun. How can we decide which concrete use cases to build? If you’re helping a business figure out where to apply AI, I’ve found the following recipe useful as a brainstorming aid…
AI Fund's process for building startups
Letters

Where Are the Opportunities in AI? Here's Where to Look: Generative AI opens the way to create valuable products, especially in the application layer.

I recently spoke about “Opportunities in AI” at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. I'd like to share a few observations from that presentation, and I invite you to watch the video (37 minutes).
AI for Good framework
Letters

Unlocking AI's Potential for Positive Impact: AI can make a difference when stakes are high and lives hang in the balance. Learn how in our new specialization, AI for Good.

Amidst rising worry about AI harms both realistic (like job loss) and unrealistic (like human extinction), It’s critical to understand AI’s potential to do tremendous good. Our new specialization is designed to empower people to identify, scope, and build impactful AI projects.
The Unlikely Roots of Large Language Models: U.S. military funding helped build the foundation for ChatGPT and other innovations in natural language processing.
Letters

The Unlikely Roots of Large Language Models: U.S. military funding helped build the foundation for ChatGPT and other innovations in natural language processing.

I’d like to share a part of the origin story of large language models that isn’t widely known. A lot of early work in natural language processing (NLP) was funded by U.S. military intelligence agencies that needed machine translation and speech recognition capabilities.

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