Letters from Andrew Ng

Chart comparing U.S. vs. China AI language model performance, July 2024-July 2025, showing Elo ratings over time.

Letters

High Stakes for Nations in the Great AI Race: The U.S. leads in AI, but China is gaining momentum. Democratic countries should remove roadblocks to AI progress so they can build models that support human rights and the rule of law.

There is now a path for China to surpass the U.S. in AI. Even though the U.S. is still ahead, China has tremendous momentum with its vibrant open-weights model ecosystem and aggressive moves in semiconductor design and manufacturing.

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Letters

Announcing Buildathon!: DeepLearning.AI and AI Fund announce Buildathon, which challenges AI buiders to engineer software projects rapidly. Sign up to compete on August 16, 2025!

We’re organizing a new event called Buildathon: The Rapid Engineering Competition, to be held in the San Francisco Bay Area on Saturday, August 16, 2025!

Illustrations of futuristic aircraft design concepts, featuring vertical takeoff and retractable wings for space orbit.

Letters

How to Get Through the Product Management Bottleneck: As AI-assisted coding accelerates building software products, deciding what to build is a new bottleneck. Speedy decisions and empathy for users can get past it.

The invention of modern writing instruments like the typewriter made writing easier, but they also led to the rise of writer’s block, where deciding what to write became the bottleneck.

Map of the U.S. showing the status of AI governance bills by state in 2025, color-coded by legislative progress.

Letters

How The U.S. “One Big Beautiful Bill” Will Shape AI Regulation: State-by-state regulation of AI will create a shifting patchwork of laws that are likely to hamper innovation even as they provide lesser benefits.

Last week, the United States Congress passed President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” I’m disappointed it didn’t include a proposed moratorium on U.S. state-level AI regulation.

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Letters

Short of Time to Build With AI? Simplify Your Projects: Scale down your AI projects into something you can execute quickly. Then collect feedback from users to sharpen your ideas.

I’d like to share a tip for getting more practice building with AI — that is, either using AI building blocks to build applications or using AI coding assistance to create powerful applications quickly.

Court document excerpt supporting fair use of copyrighted books to train LLMs, comparing it to teaching children to write.

Letters

A Major Risk to AI Development Just Decreased: A U.S. federal judge ruled that training LLMs on copyrighted works is fair use. AI models are free to learn from books just like people are.

On Monday, a United States District Court ruled that training LLMs on copyrighted books constitutes fair use.

H1B visa approval notice from USCIS for Stanford University, dated July 11, 2005, valid from September 2005 to August 2006.

Letters

High-Skilled Immigration and International Students Are Good For the U.S. — And the World: Making H1-B and F-1 visas more difficult to get harms U.S. competitiveness in AI and innovation worldwide.

One of the most effective things the U.S. or any other nation can do to ensure its competitiveness in AI is to welcome high-skilled immigration and international students who have the potential to become high-skilled.

Colorful LEGO bricks labeled for AI concepts: prompting, agentic, guardrails, evals, RAG, fine-tuning, computer use, async programming.

Letters

Meet The New Breed of GenAI Application Engineers: A new breed of software engineers is building more powerful applications faster than ever, thanks to generative AI. Here’s how to identify them in job interviews.

There’s a new breed of GenAI Application Engineers who can build more-powerful applications faster than was possible before, thanks to generative AI.

Robots building a wooden house frame under sunny sky. Teamwork, technology, and construction. Future automation in construction.

Letters

How AI Fund Is Building AI Builders: AI-enabled coding empowers anyone build software that boosts productivity and makes life easier. Here’s now non-engineers at AI Fund are building apps for fun and profit.

Everyone can benefit by learning to code with AI! At AI Fund, the venture studio I lead, everyone — not just the engineers — can vibe code or use more sophisticated AI-assisted coding techniques.

Bar chart showing proposed 2026 U.S. science funding cuts vs. 2025 for agencies like USFS, NSF, NASA, and DoE.

Letters

Cut Research Funding, Weaken the Nation: Open scientific research makes the U.S. stronger. Cutting funding risks national competitiveness and security.

I am alarmed by the proposed cuts to U.S. funding for basic research, analyzed here, and the impact this would have for U.S. competitiveness in AI and other areas.

Cartoon: Woman at desk; man in sandbox with shovel saying, "I'm experimenting!" in office setting.

Letters

How Large Companies Can Move Fast in AI: Enterprises can accelerate AI development in a sandbox environment that eliminates roadblocks while minimizing risks.

In the age of AI, large corporations — not just startups — can move fast. I often speak with large companies’ C-suite and Boards about AI strategy and implementation, and would like to share some ideas that are applicable to big companies.

Black stopwatch icon showing elapsed time, commonly used to represent speed, countdowns, or time tracking.

Letters

The Value of AI’s Speed Is Underrated: The value of AI-driven productivity is well recognized, but AI-driven speed can create growth, too.

AI’s ability to make tasks not just cheaper, but also faster, is underrated in its importance in creating business value.