At a Glance
- Andrew Ng warns AI is both amazing and highly limited amid a $hundreds-billion boom.
- He stays bullish on AI’s growth but doubts near-term human displacement.
- He urges coding, transparency, and careful regulation as AI expands.
- Why it matters: Investors, coders, and regulators look to Ng’s guidance as AI reshapes markets and society.
Andrew Ng, a former News Of Philadelphia Brain co-founder and current AI luminary, recently shared his views at an AI Developers Conference, weighing AI’s promise against its pitfalls amid a surge of investment and regulatory scrutiny.
AI’s Promise vs. Limits
Ng says AI is both amazing and highly limited, noting the balance is hard to grasp.
Andrew Ng stated:
> “The tricky thing about AI is that it is amazing and it is also highly limited. And understanding that balance of how amazing and how limited it is, that’s difficult.”
Education, Coding, and the Future Workforce
Ng counters advice that AI will replace coders, insisting coding should grow.
Andrew Ng said:
> “Some senior business leaders were recently advising others to not learn to code on the grounds that AI will automate coding. We’ll 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.”
Andrew Ng added:
> “It’s true that I don’t 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’t screen resumes by hand. They write prompts or write code to screen resumes.”
Andrew Ng added:
> “People that use AI to write code will just be more productive, and I think have more fun than people that don’t. There will be a big societal shift towards people who code.”
Risks, Mental Health, and Regulation
Ng discusses mental-health incidents, regulatory concerns, and transparency.
Andrew Ng said:
> “The death of any single person is absolutely tragic. At the same time, I am nervous about one or two anecdotes leading to stifling regulations. That means it doesn’t help save 10 lives, right? It’s a very difficult calculus for the number of people that are getting good mental health support from these systems.”
Andrew Ng added:
> “If 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.”
Transparency Laws
Ng underscores the importance of transparency laws such as SB 53 in California and the RAISE Act in New York.
Andrew Ng said:
> “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 and RAISE Act in New York.”
Market Outlook: Training, Inference, and New Frontiers
Ng explains training costs, inference demand, and voice & agentic AI.
| AI Stage | Key Question | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Training / Pre-training | When will the capital pay off? | GPU cost, data prep |
| Inference | How much demand will grow? | Data center needs |
Ng notes that training is where the real questions lie, while inference demand is massive and growing.
Andrew Ng said:
> “The first steps of creating AI models, referred to as the “training” or “pretraining” stages, is 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?”
Andrew Ng added:
> “Inference demand is massive, and I’m very confident inference demand will continue to grow.”
Andrew Ng added:
> “We need to build a lot more data centers to serve this demand.”
Ng highlights voice AI and agentic AI as future growth areas.
Andrew Ng said:
> “Looking ahead to other areas of AI, the public should be paying more attention to voice-related AI. I think people underestimate how big voice AI will get. If you look at “Star Trek” movies, no one envisioned everyone typing on the keyboard, right?”
Andrew Ng said:
> “During the summer of last year, a bunch of marketers got hold of the ‘agentic AI’ term and slapped it as a sticker on everything in sight, which caused the hype to just take off incredibly rapidly.”
Andrew Ng added:
> “I’m very confident that the field of agentic AI will keep on growing and rising in value. I don’t know what the hype will do. That’s hard to predict. But the actual commercial value will keep rapidly rising.”
Key Takeaways
- AI is both amazing and highly limited, a balance Ng emphasizes.
- Coding should expand; AI will not replace coders soon.
- Training costs are high, but inference demand is growing, driving data-center expansion.
- Voice and agentic AI are identified as the next major growth sectors.
Ng’s insights highlight that while AI’s potential is vast, its limits and risks require careful attention from developers, educators, and policymakers.
