Letters from Andrew Ng

On Monday, a number of large music labels sued AI music makers Suno and Udio for copyright infringement. Their lawsuit echoes The New York Times’ lawsuit against OpenAI in December.

Inexpensive token generation and agentic workflows for large language models (LLMs) open up intriguing new possibilities for training LLMs on synthetic data...

The rise of cloud-hosted AI software has brought much discussion about the privacy implications of using it. But I find that users, including both consumers and developers building on such software

Last year, a number of large businesses and individuals went to the media and governments and pushed the message that AI is scary, impossible to control, and might even lead to human extinction. Unfortunately they succeeded: Now many people think AI is scary.

As I wrote in an earlier letter, whether AI is sentient or conscious is a philosophical question rather than a scientific one, since there is no widely agreed-upon definition and test for these terms.

Last week, the New York Times (NYT) filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging massive copyright infringements. The suit claims, among other things, that OpenAI and Microsoft used millions of copyrighted NYT articles to train their models...

Last week, I participated in the United States Senate’s Insight Forum on Artificial Intelligence to discuss “Risk, Alignment, & Guarding Against Doomsday Scenarios.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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!

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.

As you can read in this issue of The Batch, generative AI companies are being sued over their use of data (specifically images and code) scraped from the web to train their models.