Letters from Andrew Ng

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...

Happy New Year! As we enter 2021, I want to share with you three wishes I have for AI in the upcoming year. I hope we can: Narrow the gap between proofs-of-concept and production.

Like many people in the AI community, I am saddened by the sudden departure from Google of ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru. Timnit is a tireless champion of diversity and fairness in AI.

Today we take it for granted that many people know how to read and write. Someday, I hope, it will be just as common that people know how to write code. Several hundred years ago, society didn’t view language literacy as a necessary skill.

Last week, I asked what values the AI community stands for. Thank you to everyone who replied! The email responses in aggregate ran to 55 pages of text, and I enjoyed reading all of them.

Earlier this week, I asked a question on social media: What is the most important problem that the AI community should work on? Thousands of you responded. The most frequently mentioned themes included...