Letters from Andrew Ng

I’ve noticed a trend in how generative AI applications are built that might affect both big companies and developers: The gravity of data is decreasing.

Earlier this month, my team AI Fund held its annual co-founder and CEO summit, where many of our collaborators gathered in California for two days to discuss how to build AI companies.

On the LMSYS Chatbot Arena Leaderboard, which pits chatbots against each other anonymously and prompts users to judge which one generated a better answer...

I’m delighted that the crisis at OpenAI, which you can read about below, seems to have been resolved with an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return as CEO after his sudden firing last week.

I wrote earlier about how my team at AI Fund saw that GPT-3 set a new direction for building language applications, two years before ChatGPT was released. I’ll go out on a limb to make another prediction

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 recently spoke about “Opportunities in AI” at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. I'd like to share a few observations from that presentation, and I invite you to watch the video (37 minutes).

Last week, I returned home from Asia, where I spoke at Seoul National University in Korea, the National University of Singapore, and the University of Tokyo in Japan and visited many businesses.

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!

There are many great applications to be built on top of large language models, and the overhead of doing so may be lower than you think. Sometimes, I've spent all day on a weekend developing ideas only to find that I've spent less than $0.50.

The competitive landscape of large language models (LLMs) is evolving quickly. The ultimate winners are yet to be determined, and already the current dynamics are exciting. Let me share a few observations, focusing on direct-to-consumer...

Last week, the tech news site The Information reported an internal controversy at Google. Engineers were concerned that Google’s Bard large language model was trained in part on output from OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which would have violated OpenAI’s terms of use.

Generative AI is taking off, and along with it excitement and hype about the technology’s potential. I encourage you to think of it as a general-purpose technology (GPT, not to be confused with the other GPT: generative pretrained transformer).

Last week, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), Signature Bank, and Silvergate Bank suddenly collapsed. If it passed uneventfully from your point of view, good for you! Many companies worked nonstop through the weekend scrambling to preserve funds so they could pay their employees.

ChatGPT has raised fears that students will harm their learning by using it to complete assignments. Voice cloning, another generative AI technology, has fooled people into giving large sums of money to scammers, as you can read in this issue of The Batch.