Personal Insights - The Batch

Three-screen demo of audience simulator showing engagement levels from bored to highly engaged using animated facial expressions.

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.

Cornucopia overflowing with fruits and vegetables.

Letters

Building a Better Future For All: Many people need help, and technology is the best way to help people at scale. Let’s get to work.

Happy Thanksgiving! In the United States, this is a week when many reflect on their blessings and give thanks.

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

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.

World Economic Forum, January 16, 2024: "The Expanding Universe of Generative Models" panelists

Letters

AI On the Agenda at the World Economic Forum: The World Economic Forum at Davos felt like an AI conference, with big takeaways for business and regulation.

Last week, I attended the World Economic Forum, an annual meeting of leaders in government, business, and culture at Davos, Switzerland.

Andrew Ng holding a computer while sitting next to a chimney

Letters

What Will Change — And What Will Stay the Same: Change is hard to predict, so invest your time and energy in things that aren't likely to change.

AI is progressing faster than ever. This is thrilling, yet rapid change can be disorienting. In such times, it’s useful to follow Jeff Bezos’ advice to think about not only what is changing but also what will stay the same.

Letters

The View From NeurIPS 2023: NeurIPS 2023 was chockablock with generative AI, large multimodal models, autonomous agents — and anxiety about the pace of development.

Last week, I attended the NeurIPS conference in New Orleans. It was fun to catch up with old friends, make new ones, and also get a wide scan of current AI research.

Illustration of a firey cloud over a city

Letters

Horror and Heartbreak: It's time for people of conscience to condemn Hamas’ attack on Israel.

Over the weekend, Hamas launched a surprise terrorist attack on Israel, slaughtering and kidnapping civilians. The images in the media are horrifying, and over 1,000 people...

List displaying 5 out of 17 computer programmers tasks by O*NET OnLine

Letters

Which AI Applications Should You Build? Here's How to Decide: AI isn't ideal for everything. How can you decide which use cases to build? Think about tasks, not jobs.

While AI is a general-purpose technology that’s useful for many things, it isn’t good for every task under the sun. How can we decide which concrete use cases to build? If you’re helping a business figure out where to apply AI, I’ve found the following recipe useful as a brainstorming aid…

Letters

Does AI Understand the World?: There's no scientific test for understanding, but there is evidence that large language models understand the world to some extent.

Do large language models understand the world? As a scientist and engineer, I’ve avoided asking whether an AI system “understands” anything. There’s no widely agreed-upon, scientific test for whether a system really understands — as opposed to appearing to understand —

Letters

What Lawmakers Need to Know About AI: Few people in the world have the information required to regulate AI effectively. Governments need to get it.

Suddenly it seems like everyone wants to regulate AI. The European Union is on the verge of enacting a comprehensive AI Act that’s intended to mitigate risks and protect individual rights. In the United States, Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer foresees legislation possibly within months.