NEW YORK \u2014 When Andrew Ng talks about AI, people listen \u2014 in classrooms, boardrooms and Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n
The researcher<\/a>–turned-educator<\/a>–turned-investor<\/a> has become an AI statesman of sorts, co-founding Google Brain, which became part of Google\u2019s flagship DeepMind division that now produces some of the world\u2019s best AI systems, and serving as chief scientist of Chinese tech titan Baidu.<\/p>\n In today\u2019s influencer-obsessed information landscape, Ng\u2019s biggest claim to fame might be his credential as a \u201cTop Voice\u201d on LinkedIn, an honor the platform gives to a few handpicked experts, with over 2.3 million followers.<\/p>\n Armed with decades of AI experience, Ng says he remains clear-eyed about AI\u2019s abilities. \u201cThe tricky thing about AI is that it is amazing and it is also highly limited,\u201d Ng told NBC News in an interview on the sidelines of his AI Developers Conference in November. \u201cAnd understanding that balance of how amazing and how limited it is, that\u2019s difficult.\u201d<\/p>\n Over the past few years, generative AI has attracted hundreds of billions of dollars in investment, as nearly every major tech company has pivoted toward the industry\u2019s hottest topic. But in the last several months, many have questioned whether the surging investment has created a bubble now at risk of bursting due to persistent issues like hallucinations<\/a>, AI\u2019s involvement in mental health crises<\/a> and increased regulatory scrutiny<\/a>.<\/p>\n Ng is broadly bullish about AI\u2019s upward trajectory, though he is quick to cast doubt on AI systems\u2019 potential to broadly displace humans in the near future. He has repeatedly argued<\/a> that artificial general intelligence (AGI), roughly defined as AI systems that can match human performance on all meaningful tasks, is a distant possibility \u2014 contrary to other AI luminaries who envision AGI emerging in the next few years<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cI look at how complex the training recipes are and how manual AI training and development is today, and there\u2019s no way this is going to take us all the way to AGI just by itself,\u201d Ng said.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen someone uses AI and the system knows some language, it took much more work to prepare the data, to train the AI, to learn that one set of things than is widely appreciated,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n Ng also has stellar bona fides in the education world. In addition to teaching computer science at Stanford University, Ng founded Coursera \u2014 one of the world\u2019s largest online learning platforms<\/a> \u2014 and oversees one of the most popular AI-focused education platforms, DeepLearning.AI<\/a>.<\/p>\n With over a decade of success in the AI-meets-education ecosystem, Ng adopts a Chef Gusteau approach<\/a> to AI education and coding in particular, arguing that anybody and everybody should code given advancements in coding tools.<\/p>\n \u201cSome senior business leaders were recently advising others to not learn to code on the grounds that AI will automate coding,\u201d Ng said. \u201cWe\u2019ll look back on that as some of the worst career advice ever given. Because as coding becomes easier, as it has for decades, as technology has improved, more people should code, not fewer.\u201d<\/p>\n Many experts have recently asserted<\/a> that coding is the \u201cepicenter of AI progress<\/a>\u201d and that AI\u2019s shocking capabilities only become apparent when people use AI tools to code<\/a>. Those developments have led some to theorize that traditional coding-only jobs will wither<\/a> with the rise of AI, and early evidence backs up those claims<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s true that I don\u2019t want to write code by hand anymore. I want AI to do it for me. But as the barriers become lower and lower, more people should do it. For example, my best recruiters don\u2019t screen resumes by hand. They write prompts or write code to screen resumes.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cPeople that use AI to write code will just be more productive, and I think have more fun than people that don\u2019t. There will be a big societal shift towards people who code,\u201d Ng added.<\/p>\n As AI systems become more powerful, Ng is aware that real downsides are emerging \u2014 but he thinks today\u2019s risks pale in comparison to AI\u2019s potential upside.<\/p>\n \u201cI think for a lot of AI models, the benefit is so much greater than the harm,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n \u201cThe death of any single person is absolutely tragic,\u201d Ng added, referencing recent suicides that allegedly involved <\/a>the use of AI. \u201cAt the same time, I am nervous about one or two anecdotes leading to stifling regulations. That means it doesn\u2019t help save 10 lives, right? It\u2019s a very difficult calculus for the number of people that are getting good mental health support from these systems.\u201d<\/p>\n Instead of what he describes as suffocating regulation, Ng is a strong proponent of laws that demand transparency from leading AI companies, like the recently passed SB 53 in California <\/a>and RAISE Act in New York<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cIf I had my druthers, if I were a regulator, transparency of large platforms is what I will push for, because that gives us a much better chance of being able to clearly see what problems there are, if any, and then work for their solution,\u201d Ng said.<\/p>\n Ng is also intimately connected with many of today\u2019s private-sector AI leaders<\/a>: He oversaw Dario Amodei<\/a>, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, when Amodei worked at Baidu; briefly taught<\/a> Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, at Stanford; and served as a postdoc advisor<\/a> to Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder of OpenAI who left to create a competing, early-stage organization called Safe Superintelligence<\/a>.<\/p>\n Despite his connections to this Silicon Valley cadre that has announced trillions of dollars<\/a> of AI infrastructure investment, Ng is quick to contend that part of today\u2019s AI landscape looks like a bubble<\/a>.<\/p>\n Ng said the first steps of creating AI models, referred to as the \u201ctraining\u201d or \u201cpretraining\u201d stages, \u201cis where a lot of the questions are, where the very real questions are. When will the payoff for all of the capital expenses going into this training, when will they pay off?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhatever happens, it will be good for the industry, but certain businesses might do poorly,\u201d Ng said, referring to the possibility of a bubble collapse.<\/p>\n Instead, Ng sees steady and rising demand for the later stages of AI computation, referred to as the \u201cinference\u201d stage, when users query preset AI systems. \u201cInference demand is massive, and I\u2019m very confident inference demand will continue to grow.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe need to build a lot more data centers to serve this demand,\u201d Ng added.<\/p>\n Ng was an early advocate<\/a> of today\u2019s most widely adopted approach for building today\u2019s most advanced AI models, in which AI companies use powerful computer hardware called graphics processing units (GPUs) that were once mainly used by video-game enthusiasts. Nvidia\u2019s status as the world\u2019s most valuable company<\/a> stems almost entirely from its world-leading GPUs that now power many of the world\u2019s top data centers.<\/p>\n Looking ahead to other areas of AI, Ng said the public should be paying more attention to voice-related AI. \u201cI think people underestimate how big voice AI will get. If you look at \u201cStar Trek\u201d movies, no one envisioned everyone typing on the keyboard, right?\u201d<\/p>\n Ng also said the public should expect more and rapid progress in the field of \u201cagentic AI,\u201d a term he helped popularize that references AI systems that can perform many actions autonomously.<\/p>\n \u201cDuring the summer of last year, a bunch of marketers got hold of the \u2018agentic AI\u2019 term and slapped it as a sticker on everything in sight, which caused the hype to just take off incredibly rapidly.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m very confident that the field of agentic AI will keep on growing and rising in value,\u201d Ng said. \u201cI don\u2019t know what the hype will do. That\u2019s hard to predict. But the actual commercial value will keep rapidly rising.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK \u2014 When Andrew Ng talks about AI, people listen \u2014 in classrooms, boardrooms and Silicon Valley.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":376082,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-376081","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=376081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376081\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/376082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=376081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=376081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=376081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}