Letters from Andrew Ng

Fine-tuning large language models on a seemingly benign task that would be useful to writers — expanding plot summaries into paragraphs of polished fiction — causes them to regurgitate substantial portions of books on which they were pretrained.

An ecosystem of API proxy servers enables AI developers in China to access top U.S. models at deeply discounted prices.

An AI-powered network of thermal sensors is helping ships avoid collisions with whales.

There have been intense efforts over the past few years to lobby governments to pass AI laws for regulatory capture or to suppress open source.

AI-driven activity on the internet rose sharply last year, a study shows.

The European Union weakened some provisions of its landmark AI Act and delayed others after businesses and policymakers argued the law made European companies less competitive.

One of the new, buzzy jobs in Silicon Valley is the AI Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), an engineer who is embedded within a client organization to help customize solutions, such as building and tuning agentic workflows that suit the client’s particular needs.

AI agents seem to be increasingly capable of performing economically valuable tasks, but current benchmarks measure this capability only narrowly.

China shut down Meta’s attempt to acquire agentic technology that originated within its borders, a blow to further technical interchange and investment between China and the U.S. 

While large language models can behave in human-like ways, the similarities are superficial. A simple strategy game revealed clear differences in their strategic approaches.

Commitments by large AI companies to limit emissions of greenhouse gases are at risk as those companies pursue a massive build-out of data centers, many of which will be powered by fossil fuels in the near term and possibly beyond.

Resistance to new data centers is mounting across the United States.

U.S. states are continuing to enact laws that regulate AI, despite President Trump’s efforts to discourage state-by-state legislation in favor of national laws.

People whose vision is impaired increasingly use AI to assess their own appearance, raising questions about the psychological impact of AI models that are trained on conventional standards of beauty.

Google added a music generator to Gemini and YouTube, putting a model that produces synthetic songs in front of hundreds of millions of users.