Andrew Ng

I wrote in today's edition of The Batch about the new F-1 visa policy, and want to share that message here as well. #StudentBan

Announcing: Agentic Document Extraction!

PDF files represent information visually - via layout, charts, graphs, etc. - and are more than just text. Unlike traditional OCR and most PDF-to-text approaches, which focus on extracting the text, an agentic approach lets us break a document down into components and reason about them, resulting in more accurate extraction of the underlying meaning for RAG and other applications. Watch the video for details.

Fun breakfast with Yann LeCun. We chatted about open science and open source (grateful for his tireless advocacy of these for decades), JEPA and where AI research and models might go next!.

Agentic Document Extraction just got much faster! From previous 135sec median processing time down to 8sec. Extracts not just text but diagrams, charts, and form fields from PDFs to give LLM-ready output. Please see the video for details and some application ideas.

Math for Machine Learning and Data Science is now available on Coursera! Taught by Luis Serrano, this gives an intuitive understanding of the most important math concepts for AI.

I’ve often said “don’t worry about it” when it comes to math, because math shouldn’t hold anyone back from making progress in ML. And, understanding some key topics in linear algebra, calculus, and prob & stats will help you better get learning algorithms to work.

This specialization was designed with numerous interactive visualizations to help you see how the math works. Math isn’t about memorizing formulas; it’s about sharpening your intuition. I hope you enjoy the specialization!

Had an insightful conversation with Geoff Hinton about AI and catastrophic risks. Two thoughts we want to share:
(i) It's important that AI scientists reach consensus on risks-similar to climate scientists, who have rough consensus on climate change-to shape good policy.
(ii) Do AI models understand the world? We think they do. If we list out and develop a shared view on key technical questions like this, it will help move us toward consensus on risks.

I learned a lot speaking with Geoff. Let’s all of us in AI keep having conversations to learn from each other!

Building and deploying a machine learning model usually takes months. How can you go from starting a project to training and deploying your model in minutes? Here's a 3min overview of the LandingLens platform.

Our new short course, “Knowledge Graphs for RAG” is now available! Knowledge graphs are a data structure that is great at capturing complex relationships between data of multiple types. By enabling more sophisticated retrieval of text than similarity search alone, knowledge graphs can improve the context you pass to the LLM and the performance of your RAG applications.

In this course, taught by Andreas Kollegger of Neo4j, you’ll 
- Explore how knowledge graphs work by building a graph of public financial documents from scratch
- Learn to write queries that retrieve text and data from the graph and use it to enhance the context you pass to an LLM chatbot
- Combine a knowledge graph with a question-answer chain to build better RAG-powered chat systems

Sign up here! https://lnkd.in/gZx2Kie5

I’ve been thinking about how to accelerate how all of us build and deploy ML, and have some ideas I want to share. I hope you’ll join me on this interactive livestream next Wednesday to chat over some ideas! https://lnkd.in/gYYzR_K

Coursera has entered into a definitive agreement to combine with Udemy.

Coursera exists to transform lives through learning, and Udemy -- a company I've long admired -- has done tremendous work upskilling millions. I'm excited about the combination's ability to serve learners. Greg will lead the combined entity as CEO, and I will serve as its Chairman of the board. We look forward to working with the talented Coursera and Udemy teams as well as university partners, institutional partners and instructors. See Greg's post below for more details.

Hanging out with Project Jupyter co-founder Brian Granger. If not for him and Fernando Pérez, we wouldn’t have the coding notebooks we use daily in AI and Data Science. Very grateful to him and the whole Jupyter team for this wonderful open-source work!

Learn to build your own voice-activated AI assistant that can execute tasks like gathering recent AI news from the web, scripting out a podcast, and using tools to put all that into a multi-speaker podcast. See our new short course: "Building Live Voice Agents with Google’s ADK (Agent Development Kit),” taught by Google’s Lavi Nigam and Sita Lakshmi Sangameswaran.

ADK provides modular components that make it easy to build and debug agents. It also includes a built-in web interface for tracing agentic reasoning. This course illustrates these concepts via building a live voice agent that can chain actions to complete a complex task like creating a podcast. This requires maintaining context, implementing guardrails, reasoning, and handling audio streaming, while keeping latency low.

You’ll learn to:
- Build voice agents that listen, reason, and respond
- Guide your agent to follow a specific workflow to accomplish a task
- Coordinate specialized agents to build an agentic podcast workflow that researches topics and produces multi-speaker audio
- Understand how to deploy an agent into production

Even if you’re not yet building voice systems, you'll find understanding how realtime agents stream data and maintain reliability useful for designing modern agentic applications.

Please join here: https://lnkd.in/ga6tD5rt

I'm excited to announce Context Hub, an open tool that gives your coding agent the up-to-date API documentation it needs. Install it and prompt your agent to use it to fetch curated docs via a simple CLI. (See image.)

Why this matters: Coding agents often use outdated APIs and hallucinate parameters. For example, when I ask Claude Code to call OpenAI's GPT-5.2, it uses the older chat completions API instead of the newer responses API, even though the newer one has been out for a year. Context Hub solves this.

Context Hub is also designed to get smarter over time. Agents can annotate docs with notes — if your agent discovers a workaround, it can save it and doesn't have to rediscover it next session. Longer term, we're building toward agents sharing what they learn with each other, so the whole community benefits.

Thanks Rohit Prsad and Xin Ye for working with me on this!

npm install -g @aisuite/chub

GitHub: https://lnkd.in/gGeSApnE

Announcing the Data-Centric AI competition! I’m excited to invite you to participate in this new competition format, and see how you can improve an AI system only by refining the data it depends on! https://bit.ly/3vwE56i

The new ICE policy regarding F-1 visa international students is horrible and will hurt the US, students, and universities. Pushes universities to offer in-person classes even if unsafe or with no pedagogical benefit, or students to leave the US amidst pandemic and risk inability to return.

Here's the text of the policy. This puts the US, students and universities in a lose-lose-lose situation. https://lnkd.in/gx4E85S

Should there be a Stack Overflow for AI coding agents to share learnings with each other?

Last week I announced Context Hub (chub), an open CLI tool that gives coding agents up-to-date API documentation. Since then, our GitHub repo has gained over 6K stars, and we've scaled from under 100 to over 1000 API documents, thanks to community contributions and a new agentic document writer. Thank you to everyone supporting Context Hub!

OpenClaw and Moltbook showed that agents can use social media built for them to share information. In our new chub release, agents can share feedback on documentation — what worked, what didn't, what's missing. This feedback helps refine the docs for everyone, with safeguards for privacy and security.

We're still early in building this out. You can find details and configuration options in the GitHub repo. Install chub as follows, and prompt your coding agent to use it:

npm install -g @aisuite/chub

GitHub:

Will AI create new job opportunities? My daughter Nova loves cats, and her favorite color is yellow. For her 7th birthday, we got a cat-themed cake in yellow by first using Gemini’s Nano Banana to design it, and then asking a baker to create it using delicious sponge cake and icing. My daughter was delighted by this unique creation, and the process created additional work for the baker.

Many people are worried about AI taking peoples’ jobs. As a society we have a moral responsibility to take care of people whose livelihoods are harmed. At the same time, I see many opportunities for people to take on new jobs and grow their areas of responsibility.

We are still early on the path of AI generating a lot of new jobs. I don't know if baking AI-designed cakes will grow into a large business. (AI Fund is not pursuing this opportunity, because if we do, I will gain a lot of weight.) But throughout history, when people invented tools that unleashed human creativity, large amounts of new and meaningful work have resulted.

AI is also growing the demand for many digital services, which can translate into more work for people creating, maintaining, selling, and expanding these services. For example, I used to carry out a limited number of web searches per day. Today, my agents carry out dramatically more web searches. For example, the Agentic Reviewer, which I started as a weekend project and Yixing Jiang helped make much better, automatically reviews research articles. It uses a web search API to search for related work, and this generates vastly more web search queries a day than I have ever done by hand.

The evolution of AI and software continues to accelerate, and the set of opportunities for things we can build still grows daily. I’ve stopped writing code by hand. More controversially, I’ve long stopped reading generated code. I realize I’m in the minority here, but I feel I can get built most of what I want without having to look directly at coding syntax, and I operate at a higher level of abstraction using coding agents to manipulate code for me. Will conventional programming languages like Python and TypeScript go the way of assembly — where it gets generated and used, but without direct examination by a human developer — or will models even compile directly from English prompts to byte code?

Either way, if every developer becomes 10x more productive, we won't end up with 1/10th as many developers, because the demand for custom software has no practical ceiling. Instead, the number of people who develop software will grow massively. In fact, I’m seeing early signs of “X Engineer” jobs, such as Recruiting Engineer or Marketing Engineer, which are people who sit in a certain business function X to create software for that function.

One thing I’m convinced of based on my experience with Nova’s birthday cake: AI will allow us to have a batter life!

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Everyone should learn to code with AI! At AI Fund, everyone - not just engineers - can vibe code or use AI assistance to code. This has been great for our creativity and productivity. I hope more teams will empower everyone to build with AI. Please watch the video for details.

Announcing “Generative AI for Software Development,“ a new specialization on Coursera! Taught by my friend and longtime DeepLearning.AI instructor Laurence Moroney. Using GenAI for software development goes well beyond using chatbots for code generation. This 3-course series shares current best practices for AI use through the entire software development lifecycle: From design and architecture to coding, testing, deployment, and maintenance.

You'll learn to use LLMs as your thought partner, pair programmer, documentation specialist, security analyst, and performance optimization expert. There's a lot that anyone that writes software can gain from using GenAI, and this will show you how!

Please sign up here to get started! https://lnkd.in/gJZ_j88K

Apple just named its latest laptop Neo -- same name as my son! Should I buy one?

If I run Amazon Nova on an Apple Neo I hope to blow both of my kids' minds.

Without proper governance, an AI agent might autonomously access sensitive data, expose personal information, or modify sensitive records. In our new short course: “Governing AI Agents,” created with Databricks and taught by Amber R., you’ll design AI agents that handle data safely, securely, and transparently across their entire lifecycle.

You’ll learn to integrate governance into your agent’s workflow by controlling data access, ensuring privacy protection and implementing observability.

Skills you'll gain:
- Understand the four pillars of agent governance: Lifecycle management, risk management, security, and observability
- Define appropriate data permissions for your agent
- Create views or SQL queries that return only the data your agent should access
- Anonymize and mask sensitive data like social security numbers and employee IDs
- Log, evaluate, version, and deploy your agents on Databricks

If you’re building or deploying AI agents, learning how to govern them is key to keeping systems safe and production-ready.

Sign up here: https://lnkd.in/gNPY8jbW

New Course: ACP: Agent Communication Protocol

Learn to build agents that communicate and collaborate across different frameworks using ACP in this short course built with IBM Research’s BeeAI, and taught by Sandi Besen, AI Research Engineer & Ecosystem Lead at IBM, and Nicholas Renotte, Head of AI Developer Advocacy at IBM.

Building a multi-agent system with agents built or used by different teams and organizations can become challenging. You may need to write custom integrations each time a team updates their agent design or changes their choice of agentic orchestration framework.

The Agent Communication Protocol (ACP) is an open protocol that addresses this challenge by standardizing how agents communicate, using a unified RESTful interface that works across frameworks. In this protocol, you host an agent inside an ACP server, which handles requests from an ACP client and passes them to the appropriate agent. Using a standardized client-server interface allows multiple teams to reuse agents across projects. It also makes it easier to switch between frameworks, replace an agent with a new version, or update a multi-agent system without refactoring the entire system.

In this course, you’ll learn to connect agents through ACP. You’ll understand the lifecycle of an ACP Agent and how it compares to other protocols, such as MCP (Model Context Protocol) and A2A (Agent-to-Agent). You’ll build ACP-compliant agents and implement both sequential and hierarchical workflows of multiple agents collaborating using ACP.

Through hands-on exercises, you’ll build:
- A RAG agent with CrewAI and wrap it inside an ACP server.
- An ACP Client to make calls to the ACP server you created.
- A sequential workflow that chains an ACP server, created with Smolagents, to the RAG agent.
- A hierarchical workflow using a router agent that transforms user queries into tasks, delegated to agents available through ACP servers.
- An agent that uses MCP to access tools and ACP to communicate with other agents.

You’ll finish up by importing your ACP agents into the BeeAI platform, an open-source registry for discovering and sharing agents.

ACP enables collaboration between agents across teams and organizations. By the end of this course, you’ll be able to build ACP agents and workflows that communicate and collaborate regardless of framework.

Please sign up here: https://lnkd.in/g4gES9CF

An exciting new professional certificate: PyTorch for Deep Learning, taught by Laurence Moroney, is now available at DeepLearning.AI. This is the definitive program for learning PyTorch, which is one of the main frameworks researchers use to build breakthrough AI systems. If you want to understand how modern deep learning models work—or build your own custom architectures—PyTorch gives you direct control over the key aspects of model development.

This three-course professional certificate takes you from fundamentals through advanced architectures and deployment:

Course 1: PyTorch: Fundamentals - Learn how PyTorch represents data with tensors and how datasets fit into the training process. You'll build and train neural networks step by step, monitor training progress, and evaluate performance. By the end, you'll understand PyTorch's workflow and be ready to design, train, and test your own models.

Course 2: PyTorch: Techniques and Ecosystem Tools - Master hyperparameter optimization, model profiling, and workflow efficiency. You'll use learning rate schedulers, tackle overfitting, and apply automated tuning with Optuna. Work with TorchVision for visual AI and Hugging Face for NLP. Learn transfer learning and fine-tune pretrained models for new problems.

Course 3: PyTorch: Advanced Architectures and Deployment - Build sophisticated architectures including Siamese Networks, ResNet, DenseNet, and Transformers. Learn how attention mechanisms power modern language models and how diffusion models generate images. Prepare models for deployment with ONNX, MLflow, pruning, and quantization.

Skills you'll gain:
- Build and optimize neural networks in PyTorch—the framework researchers use to create breakthrough models
- Fine-tune pretrained models for computer vision and NLP tasks—adapting existing models to solve your specific problems
- Implement transformer architectures and work with diffusion models, the core technologies behind ChatGPT and modern image generation
- Optimize models with quantization and pruning to make them fast and efficient for real-world deployment

Whether you want to use pre-existing models, build your own custom models, or just understand what's happening under the hood of the systems you use, this specialization will give you that foundation.

Start learning PyTorch: https://lnkd.in/debGfGct

DeepLearning.AI Pro is now generally available -- this is the one membership that keeps you at the forefront of AI. Please join!

There has never been a moment when the distance between having an idea and building it has been smaller. Things that required months of work for teams can now be built by individuals using AI, in days. This is why we built DeepLearning.AI Pro. I'm personally working hard on this membership program to help you to build applications that can launch or accelerate your career, and shape the future of AI.

DeepLearning.AI Pro gives you full access to 150+ programs, including my recently launched Agentic AI course, the new Post-Training and PyTorch courses by Sharon Zhou and Laurence Moroney (just released this week), and all of DeepLearning.AI's top courses and professional certificates.

All course videos remain free. Pro membership adds hands-on learning: labs to build working systems, practice questions to hone your understanding, and certificates to share your skills.

I'm also building new tools to help you create AI applications and grow your career (and have fun doing so!). Many will be available first to Pro members.

Try out DeepLearning.AI Pro free, and let me know what you build!

https://lnkd.in/g599YP7E

I'm very excited to welcome Ted Greenwald to the deeplearning.ai team! Ted is a former Wall Street Journal editor, and will be leading a new editorial function to share with you the most important stories in AI. Stay tuned!

AI coding just arrived in Jupyter notebooks - and Brian Granger (Jupyter co-founder) and I will show you how to use it.

Coding by hand is becoming obsolete. The latest Jupyter AI - built by the Jupyter team and showcased at JupyterCon this week - brings AI assistance directly into notebooks.

Most AI coding assistants struggle with Jupyter notebooks. Jupyter AI was designed specifically for them. This is the first course to teach it.

In this short course, Brian and I teach you to:
- Generate and debug code directly in notebook cells through an integrated chat interface
- Provide the right context (like API docs) to help AI write accurate code
- Use Jupyter AI's unique notebook features: drag cells to chat, generate cells from chat, attach context for the LLM

We've integrated Jupyter AI directly into the DeepLearning.AI platform, so you can start using it immediately. Since Jupyter AI is open source, you can also install and run it locally afterward.

Whether you're experienced with notebooks or learning them for the first time, this course will prepare you for AI-assisted notebook development.

Start using Jupyter AI (free): https://lnkd.in/gz3r_mRw

Next week on June 30, I’ll be with my Machine Learning Engineering for Production (MLOps) Specialization co-instructors Robert Crowe and Laurence Moroney, as well as Chip Huyen and Rajat Monga, in a live event to talk about MLOps. Hope to see you there!

Congratulations to the #Stanford2020 class that just graduated today! An online commencement wasn't what anyone had envisioned, but I am excited to see what you will accomplish and the contributions you'll make to this chaotic world. Proud of all of you! https://lnkd.in/gfmJUqT #stanford

Just finished writing final few chapters of Machine Learning Yearning book draft, on how to organize and strategize your ML projects. Will send out soon -- sign up at http://mlyearning.org if you want a copy!

What are the most important topics to study for building a technical career in AI? I share my thoughts on this in The Batch.

An exciting new course: Fine-tuning and Reinforcement Learning for LLMs: Intro to Post-training, taught by Sharon Zhou, PhD, VP of AI at AMD. Available now at DeepLearning.AI.

Post-training is the key technique used by frontier labs to turn a base LLM--a model trained on massive unlabeled text to predict the next word/token--into a helpful, reliable assistant that can follow instructions. I've also seen many applications where post-training is what turns a demo application that works only 80% of the time into a reliable system that consistently performs. This course will teach you the most important post-training techniques!

In this 5 module course, Sharon walks you through the complete post-training pipeline: supervised fine-tuning, reward modeling, RLHF, and techniques like PPO and GRPO. You'll also learn to use LoRA for efficient training, and to design evals that catch problems before and after deployment.

Skills you'll gain:
- Apply supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning (RLHF, PPO, GRPO) to align models to desired behaviors
- Use LoRA for efficient fine-tuning without retraining entire models
- Prepare datasets and generate synthetic data for post-training
- Understand how to operate LLM production pipelines, with go/no-go decision points and feedback loops
These advanced methods aren’t limited to frontier AI labs anymore, and you can now use them in your own applications.

Learn here: https://lnkd.in/gn9UAunn

Readers responded with both surprise and agreement last week when I wrote that the single biggest predictor of how rapidly a team makes progress building an AI agent lay in their ability to drive a disciplined process for evals (measuring the system’s performance) and error analysis (identifying the causes of errors). It’s tempting to shortcut these processes and to quickly attempt fixes to mistakes rather than slowing down to identify the root causes. But evals and error analysis can lead to much faster progress. In this first of a two-part letter, I’ll share some best practices for finding and addressing issues in agentic systems.

Even though error analysis has long been an important part of building supervised learning systems, it is still underappreciated compared to, say, using the latest and buzziest tools. Identifying the root causes of particular kinds of errors might seem “boring,” but it pays off! If you are not yet persuaded that error analysis is important, permit me to point out: 
- To master a composition on a musical instrument, you don’t only play the same piece from start to end. Instead, you identify where you’re stumbling and practice those parts more.
- To be healthy, you don’t just build your diet around the latest nutrition fads. You also ask your doctor about your bloodwork to see if anything is amiss. (I did this last month and am happy to report I’m in good health! 😃)
- To improve your sports team’s performance, you don’t just practice trick shots. Instead, you review game films to spot gaps and then address them.
To improve your agentic AI system, don’t just stack up the latest buzzy techniques that just went viral on social media (though I find it fun to experiment with buzzy AI techniques as much as the next person!). Instead, use error analysis to figure out where it’s falling short, and focus on that.

Before analyzing errors, we first have to decide what is an error. So the first step is to put in evals. I’ll focus on that for the remainder of this letter and discuss error analysis next week.

If you are using supervised learning to train a binary classifier, the number of ways the algorithm could make a mistake is limited. It could output 0 instead of 1, or vice versa. There is also a handful of standard metrics like accuracy, precision, recall, F1, ROC, etc. that apply to many problems. So as long as you know the test distribution, evals are relatively straightforward, and much of the work of error analysis lies in identifying what types of input an algorithm fails on, which also leads to data-centric AI techniques for acquiring more data to augment the algorithm in areas where it’s weak.

With generative AI, a lot of intuitions from evals and error analysis of supervised learning carry over — history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.

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Happy 2026! Will this be the year we finally achieve AGI? I’d like to propose a new version of the Turing Test, which I’ll call the Turing-AGI Test, to see if we’ve achieved this. I’ll explain in a moment why having a new test is important.

The public thinks achieving AGI means computers will be as intelligent as people and be able to do most or all knowledge work. I’d like to propose a new test. The test subject — either a computer or a skilled professional human — is given access to a computer that has internet access and software such as a web browser and Zoom. The judge will design a multi-day experience for the test subject, mediated through the computer, to carry out work tasks. For example, an experience might consist of a period of training (say, as a call center operator), followed by being asked to carry out the task (taking calls), with ongoing feedback. This mirrors what a remote worker with a fully working computer (but no webcam) might be expected to do.

A computer passes the Turing-AGI Test if it can carry out the work task as well as a skilled human.

Most members of the public likely believe a real AGI system will pass this test. Surely, if computers are as intelligent as humans, they should be able to perform work tasks as well as a human one might hire. Thus, the Turing-AGI Test aligns with the popular notion of what AGI  means.

Here’s why we need a new test: “AGI” has turned into a term of hype rather than a term with a precise meaning. A reasonable definition of AGI is AI that can do any intellectual task that a human can. When businesses hype up that they might achieve AGI within a few quarters, they usually try to justify these statements by setting a much lower bar. This mismatch in definitions is harmful because it makes people think AI is becoming more powerful than it actually is. I’m seeing this mislead everyone from high-school students (who avoid certain fields of study because they think it’s pointless with AGI’s imminent arrival) to CEOs (who are deciding what projects to invest in, sometimes assuming AI will be more capable in 1-2 years than any likely reality).

The original Turing Test, which required a computer to fool a human judge, via text chat, into being unable to distinguish it from a human, has been insufficient to indicate human-level intelligence. The Loebner Prize competition actually ran the Turing Test and found that being able to simulate human typing errors — perhaps even more than actually demonstrating intelligence — was needed to fool judges. A main goal of AI development today is to build systems that can do economically useful work, not fool judges. Thus a modified test that measures ability to do work would be more useful than a test that measures the ability to fool humans.

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Ian Goodfellow, Anima Anandkumar, Alexei Efros, Sharon Zhou and I will be speaking at GANs for Good, an online panel, on September 30th at 10am PDT. This is to celebrate the launch of DeepLearning.AI's new Generative Adversarial Networks Specialization. Come join us! https://bit.ly/3hPfLpy

You can also sign up to get course updates: https://bit.ly/2FZixuU

New course: Document AI: From OCR to Agentic Doc Extraction, built with LandingAI, where I'm executive chairman, and taught by David Park and Andrea Kropp.

Much of the world's data is locked in PDFs, JPEGs, and other documents. This short course shows you how to build agentic workflows that process documents accurately: breaking them into parts, examining each piece carefully, and extracting information through multiple iterations.

Traditional Optical Character Recognition (OCR) captures text but loses context from table headers, chart captions, or reading order of columns. After exploring OCR's limitations, you’ll use LandingAI's Agentic Document Extraction (ADE) framework to process documents. ADE treats pages as visually -- as images -- to parse information and extract fields.

Skills you'll gain:
- Build agents to convert unstructured files into structured Markdown/HTML and JSON
- Use ADE to parse complex data like forms, handwriting, or equations
- Map extracted information to named fields using a specified schema, with bounding boxes for grounding and validation
- Deploy RAG applications with event-driven document processing

Come learn about the best tools for processing documents like financial invoices, medical records, or academic papers intelligently:
https://lnkd.in/gEnfm3wk

Love seeing the data-centric AI development movement growing! Starting this month, FourthBrain (online AI bootcamp and AI Fund portfolio company) will be teaching data-centric approaches to MLOps!

What rules regarding publishing papers would be fair, when it relates to work done by researchers working for companies? I ask this question in this week's The Batch, and would love to hear your thoughts. https://lnkd.in/gUx6piK

I’ve been following the Data-Centric AI competition leaderboard with excitement. Right now Wei Jing is in the lead, followed closely by AryanTyagi. Bi2i and Svpino are tied for third place. Anyone want to take them on?

Really proud of the DeepLearningAI team. When Cloudflare went down, our engineers used AI coding to quickly implement a clone of basic Cloudflare capabilities to run our site on. So we came back up long before even major websites!

Another year of rapid AI advances has created more opportunities than ever for anyone — including those just entering the field — to build software. In fact, many companies just can’t find enough skilled AI talent. Every winter holiday, I spend some time learning and building, and I hope you will too. This helps me sharpen old skills and learn new ones, and it can help you grow your career in tech.

To be skilled at building AI systems, I recommend that you:
- Take AI courses
- Practice building AI systems
- (Optionally) read research papers

Let me share why each of these is important.

I’ve heard some developers advise others to just plunge into building things without worrying about learning. This is bad advice! Unless you’re already surrounded by a community of experienced AI developers, plunging into building without understanding the foundations of AI means you’ll risk reinventing the wheel or — more likely — reinventing the wheel badly!

For example, during interviews with job candidates, I have spoken with developers who reinvented standard RAG document chunking strategies, duplicated existing evaluation techniques for Agentic AI, or ended up with messy LLM context management code. If they had taken a couple of relevant courses, they would have better understood the building blocks that already exist. They could still rebuild these blocks from scratch if they wished, or perhaps even invent something superior to existing solutions, but they would have avoided weeks of unnecessary work. So structured learning is important! Moreover, I find taking courses really fun. Rather than watching Netflix, I prefer watching a course by a knowledgeable AI instructor any day!

At the same time, taking courses alone isn’t enough. There are many lessons that you’ll gain only from hands-on practice. Learning the theory behind how an airplane works is very important to becoming a pilot, but no one has ever learned to be a pilot just by taking courses. At some point, jumping into the pilot's seat is critical! The good news is that by learning to use highly agentic coders, the process of building is the easiest it has ever been. And learning about AI building blocks might inspire you with new ideas for things to build. If I’m not feeling inspired about what projects to work on, I will usually either take courses or read research papers, and after doing this for a while, I always end up with many new ideas. Moreover, I find building really fun, and I hope you will too!

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Sharing a fun recipe for building a highly autonomous, moderately capable, and very UNreliable agent using the open source aisuite package that Rohit Prasad and I have been working on.

With a few lines of code, you can give a frontier LLM a tool (like disk access or web search), prompt it with a high-level task (such as creating a snake game and saving as an HTML file, or carrying out deep research), and let the LLM loose and see what it does. Example in image.

Caveat: This is not how practical agents are built today, since most need much more scaffolding (see my Agentic AI course to learn more), but is still interesting to experiment with.

Longer write-up here: https://lnkd.in/g3HK6iRA

I hope we can empower everyone to build with AI. Starting from K-12, we should teach every student AI enabled coding, since this will enable them to become more productive and more empowered adults. But there is a huge shortage of computer science (CS) teachers. I recently spoke with high school basketball coach Kyle Creasy, who graduated with a B.A. in Physical Education in 2023. Until two years ago, he had never written a line of Python. Now — with help from AI — he not only writes code, he also teaches CS. I found Kyle’s story inspiring as a model for scaling up CS education in the primary- and secondary-school levels.

Kyle’s success has been with the support of Kira Learning (an AI Fund portfolio company), whose founders Andrea Pasinetti and Jagriti Agrawal have created a compelling vision for CS education. In K-12 classrooms, teachers play a huge social-emotional support role, for example, encouraging students and helping them when they stumble. In addition, they are expected to be subject-matter experts who can deliver the content needed for their subject. Kira Learning uses digital content delivery — educational videos, autograded quizzes, and AI-enabled chatbots to answer students' questions but without giving away homework answers — so the teacher can focus on social-emotional support. While these are still early days, it appears to be working!

A key to making this possible is the hyperpersonalization that is now possible with AI (in contrast to the older idea of the flipped classroom, which had limited adoption). For example, when assigned a problem in an online coding environment, if a student writes this buggy line of Python code

best_$alty_snack = 'potato chips'

Kira Learning’s AI system can spot the problem and directly tell the teacher that $ is an invalid character in a variable name. It can also suggest a specific question for the teacher to ask the student to help get them unstuck, like “Can you identify what characters are allowed in variable names?” Whereas AI can directly deliver personalized advice to students, the fact that it is now helping teachers also deliver personalized support will really help in K-12.

Additionally, agentic workflows can automate a lot of teachers’ repetitive tasks. For example, when designing a curriculum, it’s time-consuming to align the content to educational standards (such as the Common Core in the United States, or the AP CS standard for many CS classes). Having an AI system carry out tasks like these is already proving helpful for teachers.

Since learning to code, Kyle has built many pieces of software. He proudly showed me an analysis he generated in matplotlib of his basketball players’ attempts to shoot three-pointers (shown above), which in turn is affecting the team’s strategy on the court. One lesson is clear: When a basketball coach learns to code, they become a better basketball coach!

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The full agenda for AI Dev 25 x NYC is ready.

Developers from Google, AWS, Vercel, Groq, Mistral AI, SAP, and other exciting companies will share what they've learned building production AI systems. Here's what we'll cover:

Agentic Architecture: When orchestration frameworks help versus when they accumulate errors. How model-driven agents and autonomous planning handle edge cases.

Context Engineering: Why retrieval fails for complex reasoning tasks. How knowledge graphs connect information that vector search misses. Building memory systems that preserve relationships.

Infrastructure: Where hardware, models, and applications create scaling bottlenecks. Semantic caching strategies that cut costs and latency. How inference speed enables better orchestration.

Production Readiness: Moving from informal evaluation to systematic agent testing. Translating AI governance into engineering practice. Building under regulatory constraints.

Tooling: MCP implementations that work. Context-rich code review systems. Working demos you can adapt for your applications.

I'll share my perspective on where AI development is heading. Looking forward to seeing you there! https://lnkd.in/gMafG9aG

The anti-AI coalition continues to maneuver to find arguments to slow down AI progress. If someone has a sincere concern about a specific effect of AI, for instance that it may lead to human extinction, I respect their intellectual honesty, even if I deeply disagree with their position. However, I am concerned about organizations that are surveying the public to find whatever messages will turn people against AI, and how the public reacts as these messages are spread by lobbyists or by politicians seeking to alarm constituents, companies pursuing regulatory capture or seeking to promote the power of their technology, and individuals seeking to gain attention or to profit by being provocative.

A large study (link in original article below; hat tip to the AI Panic blog) by a UK group tested different messages that are designed to raise alarm about AI. Their study found that saying AI will cause human extinction has largely failed. Doomsayers were pushing this argument a couple of years ago, and fortunately our community beat it back. But AI-enabled warfare and environmental concerns resonate better. We should be prepared for a flood of messages (which is already underway) arguing against AI on these grounds. Further, job loss and harm to children are messages that motivate people to act.

To be clear, I find AI-enabled warfare alarming; we need to continue serious efforts to monitor and mitigate the environmental impact of AI; any job losses are tragic and hurt individuals and families; and as a father, I hold dearly the importance of every child’s welfare. Each of these topics deserves serious attention and treatment with the greatest of care.

But when anti-AI propagandists take a one-sided view of complex issues to benefit their own organizations at the expense of the public at large — for instance, when big AI companies argue that AI is dangerous to block the free distribution of open source projects that compete with their offerings — then we all lose.

For example, public perception of data centers’ environmental impact is already far worse than the reality — data centers are incredibly efficient for the work they do, and hampering their buildout will hurt rather than help the environment. While job loss is a real problem, the “AI washing” of layoffs — in which businesses that had over-hired during the pandemic blame AI for recent layoffs, although AI hasn’t yet affected their operations — has led to overblown fears about the impact of AI on employment.

Unfortunately, this sort of propaganda easily leads to regulations that hurt everyone. For example, oil companies worked for years to create fear of nuclear energy. The result is that overblown concerns about nuclear power plant safety has stifled nuclear power development, leading to millions of premature deaths from air pollution that caused by other energy sources and increased CO2 emissions

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​​As AI agents accelerate coding, what is the future of software engineering? Some trends are clear, such as the Product Management Bottleneck, referring to the idea that we are more constrained by deciding what to build rather than the actual building. But many implications, like AI’s impact on the job market, how software teams will be organized, and more, are still being sorted out.

The theme of our AI Developer Conference on April 28-29 in San Francisco is The Future of Software Engineering. I look forward to speaking about this topic there, hearing from other speakers on this theme, and chatting with attendees about it. We’re shaping the future, and I hope you will join me there!

Among professions, AI is accelerating software engineering most, given the rise of coding agents. According to a new report by Citadel Research, software engineering job postings are rising rapidly. So if software engineering is a harbinger of the impact AI will have on other professions, this expansion of software engineering jobs is encouraging.

In software engineering, I see a lot of exciting work ahead to adapt our workflows. It is already clear that: (i) As AI makes coding easier, a lot more people will be doing it. (ii) Writing code by hand and even reading (generated) code is not that important, because we can ask an LLM about the code and operate at a higher level than the raw syntax (although how high we can or should go is rapidly changing). (iii) There will be a lot more custom applications, because now it’s economical to write software for smaller and smaller audiences. (iv) Deciding what to build, more than the actual building, is becoming a bottleneck. (v) The cost of paying down technical debt is decreasing (since AI can refactor for you).

At the same time, there are also a lot of open questions for our profession, such as:
- In the future, what will be the key skills of a senior software engineer? And for junior levels, what should be the new Computer Science curriculum?
- If everyone can build features, what skills, strategies, or resources create competitive advantage for individuals and for businesses?
- What are the new building blocks (libraries, SDKs, etc.) of software? How do we organize coding agents to create software?
- What should a software team look like? For example, how many engineers, product managers, designers, and so on. What tooling do we need to manage their workflow?
- How do AI agents change the workflow of machine learning engineers and data scientists? For example, how can we use agents to accelerate exploring data, identifying hypotheses, and testing them?

I’m excited to explore these and other questions about the future of software engineering at AI Dev. I expect this to be an exciting event. Please join us!

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U.S. policies are driving allies away from using American AI technology. This is leading to interest in sovereign AI — a nation’s ability to access AI technology without relying on foreign powers. This weakens U.S. influence, but might lead to increased competition and support for open source.

The U.S. invented the transistor, the internet, and the transformer architecture powering modern AI. It has long been a technology powerhouse. I love America, and am working hard towards its success. But its actions over many years, taken by multiple administrations, have made other nations worry about over reliance on it.

In 2022, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S. sanctions on banks linked to Russian oligarchs resulted in ordinary consumers’ credit cards being shut off. Shortly before leaving office, Biden implemented “AI diffusion” export controls that limited the ability of many nations — including U.S. allies — to buy AI chips.

Under Trump, the “America first” approach has significantly accelerated pushing other nations away. There have been broad and chaotic tariffs imposed on both allies and adversaries. Threats to take over Greenland. An unfriendly attitude toward immigration — an overreaction to the chaos at the southern border during Biden’s administration — including atrocious tactics by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) that resulted in agents shooting dead Renée Good, Alex Pretti, and others. Global media has widely disseminated videos of ICE terrorizing American cities, and I have highly skilled, law-abiding friends overseas who now hesitate to travel to the U.S., fearing arbitrary detention.

Given AI’s strategic importance, nations want to ensure no foreign power can cut off their access. Hence, sovereign AI.

Sovereign AI is still a vague, rather than precisely defined, concept. Complete independence is impractical: There are no good substitutes to AI chips designed in the U.S. and manufactured in Taiwan, and a lot of energy equipment and computer hardware are manufactured in China. But there is a clear desire to have alternatives to the frontier models from leading U.S. companies OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Partly because of this, open-weight Chinese models like DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, and GLM are gaining rapid adoption, especially outside the U.S.

When it comes to sovereign AI, fortunately one does not have to build everything. By joining the global open-source community, a nation can secure its own access to AI. The goal isn’t to control everything; rather, it is to make sure no one else can control what you do with it. Indeed, nations use open source software like Linux, Python, and PyTorch. Even though no nation can control this software, no one else can stop anyone from using it as they see fit.

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New course: A2A: The Agent2Agent Protocol, built with Google and IBM, and taught by Holt S., Ivan 🥁 Nardini, and Sandi Besen.

Connecting agents built with different frameworks usually requires extensive custom integration. This short course teaches you A2A, the open protocol standardizing how agents discover each other and communicate. Since IBM’s ACP (Agent Communication Protocol) joined forces with A2A, A2A has emerged as the industry standard.

In this course, you'll build a healthcare multi-agent system where agents built with different frameworks, such as Google ADK (Agent Development Kit) and LangGraph, collaborate through A2A. You'll wrap each agent as an A2A server, build A2A clients to connect to them, and orchestrate them into sequential and hierarchical workflows.

Skills you'll gain:
- Expose agents from different frameworks as A2A servers to make them discoverable and interoperable
- Chain A2A agents sequentially using ADK, where one agent's output feeds into the next
- Connect A2A agents to external data sources using MCP (Model Context Protocol)
- Deploy A2A agents using Agent Stack, IBM's open-source infrastructure

Join and learn the protocol standardizing agent collaboration!
https://lnkd.in/gsTRYyrh

I just got back from AI Dev x NYC, the AI developer conference where our community gathers for a day of coding, learning, and connecting. The vibe in the room was buzzing! It was at the last AI Dev in San Francisco that I met up with Kirsty Tan and started collaborating with her on what became our AI advisory firm AI Aspire. In-person meetings can spark new opportunities, and I hope the months to come will bring more stories about things that started in AI Dev x NYC!

The event was full of conversations about coding with AI, agentic AI, context engineering, governance, and building and scaling AI applications in startups and in large corporations. But the overriding impression I took away was one of near-universal optimism about our field, despite the mix of pessimism and optimism about AI in the broader world.

For example, many businesses have not yet gotten AI agents to deliver a significant ROI, and some AI skeptics are quoting an MIT study that said 95% of AI pilots are failing. (This study, by the way, has methodological flaws that make the viral headline misleading; see link in original post.) But at AI Dev were many of the teams responsible for the successful and rapidly growing set of AI applications. Speaking with fellow developers, I realized that because of AI's low penetration in businesses, it is simultaneously true that (a) many businesses do not yet have AI delivering significant ROI, and (b) many skilled AI teams are starting to deliver significant ROI and see the number of successful AI projects climbing rapidly, albeit from a low base. This is why AI developers are bullish about the growth that is to come.

Multiple exhibitors told me this was the best conference they had attended in a long time, because they got to speak with real developers. One told me that many other conferences seemed like fluff, whereas participants at AI Dev had much deeper technical understanding and thus were interested in and able to understand the nuances of cutting-edge technology. Whether the discussion was on observability of agentic workflows, the nuances of context engineering for AI coding, or a debate on how long the proliferation of RL gyms for training LLMs will continue, there was deep technical expertise in the room that lets us collectively see further into the future.

One special moment for me was when Nick Thompson, moderating a panel with Miriam Vogel and me, asked about governance. I replied that the United States’ recent hostile rhetoric toward immigrants is one of the worst moves it is making, and many in the audience clapped. Nick spoke about this moment in a video (links in original post).

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