Letters from Andrew Ng

Letters

How to Brainstorm AI Startup Ideas: Best practices for brainstorming, evaluating, and prioritizing great ideas for AI startups and products

Last week, I wrote about why working on a concrete startup or project idea — meaning a specific product envisioned in enough detail that we can build it for a specific target user

Letters

Concrete Ideas Make Strong AI Startups: AI startups can move more efficiently and effectively with a concrete product idea than a vague market concept.

AI’s usefulness in a wide variety of applications creates many opportunities for entrepreneurship.

A graphic of a hand placing a ballot into a box labeled "Vote."

Letters

Threats to Democracy and How AI Can Help: Democracy empowers each citizen to help decide who governs.

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others,” said Winston Churchill.

Letters

California’s Proposed AI Safety Law Puts Developers at Risk: California SB 1047 is intended to make AI safer, but its unclear requirements put developers, innovation, and open source in jeopardy.

I continue to be alarmed at the progress of proposed California regulation SB 1047 and the attack it represents on open source and more broadly on AI innovation.

Letters

The World Needs High-Quality AI Education More Than Ever: AI developers need high-quality education and training to keep up with changing technology and gain useful skills. At DeepLearning.AI, we put learners first.

As we reach the milestone of the 256th issue of The Batch, I’m reflecting on how AI has changed over the years and how society continues to change with it.

Letters

AI is a Tool, Not a Separate Species: Should AI developers be allowed to train models freely on the contents of the web? The lawsuit by Sony, Universal, and Warner against AI music generators Suno and Udio raises difficult questions.

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.

Letters

Coding Agents Are Evolving From Novelties to Widely Useful Tools: Three research papers offer outstanding ways to use large language models to build coding agents that perform software development tasks automatically.

On Father’s Day last weekend, I sat with my daughter to help her practice solving arithmetic problems.

Letters

Welcoming Diverse Approaches Keeps Machine Learning Strong: What technology counts as an “agent”? Instead of arguing, let's consider a spectrum along which various technologies are “agentic.”

One reason for machine learning’s success is that our field welcomes a wide range of work.

Letters

Blenders Versus Bombs, or Why California’s Proposed AI Law is Bad for Everyone: California’s proposed AI law SB-1047 stifles innovation and open source in the name of safety.

The effort to protect innovation and open source continues. I believe we’re all better off if anyone can carry out basic AI research and share their innovations.

Letters

We Need Better Evals for LLM Applications: It’s hard to evaluate AI applications built on large language models. Better evals would accelerate progress.

A barrier to faster progress in generative AI is evaluations (evals), particularly of custom AI applications that generate free-form text.

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Project Idea — A Car for Dinosaurs: AI projects don’t need to have a meaningful deliverable. Lower the bar and do something creative.

A good way to get started in AI is to start with coursework, which gives a systematic way to gain knowledge, and then to work on projects.

Letters

From Prompts to Mega-Prompts: Best practices for developers of LLM-based applications in the era of long context and faster, cheaper token generation

In the last couple of days, Google announced a doubling of Gemini Pro 1.5's input context window from 1 million to 2 million tokens, and OpenAI released GPT-4o, which generates tokens 2x faster and 50% cheaper than GPT-4 Turbo and natively accepts and generates multimodal tokens.