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Saturday, November 18, 2023

AI 'General Purpose' Tech

A Pioneer of Machine Learning, Andrew Ng believes that AI is the "new electricity." It's not useful for one thing only, he says. Electricity transformed the world 100 years ago, just like AI will do in this major transition.

Trend: the power of LLMs are a consumer tool and a developer tool

I listened to a presentation at Stanford by Andrew Ng, a pioneer in machine learning. Creator of Coursera, Founder of Deep Learning AI, Co,Founder and Head of Google Brain, and former Chief Scientist at Baidu.

He articulated where the opportunities lie in AI.

  • Think about the trends we are seeing he says. The power of LLMs are not just as a consumer tool. But also a developer tool. There are applications developer teams can build much faster now with LLMs.
  • Identify the use cases and execute on it. He says that AI at the moment is general purpose technology. it can be used for a lot of different things. But the value needs to be created by figuring out the use cases. Yep, there will be fads along the way. There is an opportunity now to create deep and hard to build apps for long term value.
  • AI is not widely adopted at the moment. It's only been really used for consumer software and a few other industries. The AI community has been building better tools for the end user to do customization, especially with text and visual prompting.
  • Note that AI today has problems with fairness and accuracy.

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