Letters from Andrew Ng

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.

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.

In last week’s issue of The Batch, Yoshua Bengio, Alon Halevy, Douwe Kiela, Been Kim, and Reza Zadeh shared their hopes for AI in 2023. I also asked people on LinkedIn and Twitter about their hopes for AI this year. Rather than...

A new report from UN Climate Change says that the world might be on track for 2.5 °C of warming by the end of the century, a potentially catastrophic level of warming that’s far above the 1.5 °C target of the 2015 Paris Agreement.

It's official: Elon Musk will buy Twitter, pending approval of the transaction by the company's stockholders and the U.S. government.

Russian troops have invaded Ukraine, and the terrifying prospect of a war in Europe weighs on my mind. My heart goes out to all the civilians affected, and I hope we won’t see the loss of life, liberty, or property that many...

I’ve been following with excitement the recent progress in space launches. Earlier this week, Richard Branson and his Virgin Galactic team flew a rocket plane 53 miles up, earning him astronaut wings.

Each year, the public relations agency Edelman produces a report on the online public’s trust in social institutions like government, media, and business. The latest Edelman Trust Barometer contains a worrisome finding...

The price of shares in video game retailer GameStop (NYSE: GME) gyrated wildly last week. Many people viewed the stock’s rapid ascent as a David-versus-Goliath story...

Last Wednesday, the U.S. Capitol building was overrun by insurrectionists at the moment when members of Congress were certifying the results of a national election.

In my letter last week, I alluded to the way AI tends to concentrate power and wealth. This tendency worries me, and I believe it deserves more attention. The U.S. government has been looking into these winner-take-most dynamics at a few leading technology companies...