No Priors Ep. 128 | With Andrew Ng, Managing General Partner at AI Fund

(instrumental music plays) Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. Today, Elade and I are here with Andrew Ng. Andrew is one of the godfathers of the AI revolution. He was the co-founder of Google Brain, Coursera, and the venture studio AI Fund. More recently, he coined the term agentic AI and joined the board of Amazon. Also, he was one of the very first people a decade ago to convince me that deep learning was the future. Welcome, Andrew. Andrew, thank you so much for being with us.

No, always great to see you.

I'm not sure where we should begin because you, you have such a broad view of these topics. But I feel like we should start with the biggest question, which is, um, you know, if you look forward at capability growth from here, uh, where does it come from? Does it come from more scale? Does it come from data work?

Multiple vectors of progress. So I think, um, there is probably a little bit more juice out of the scalability lemon that we squeeze, so hopefully you can see many products there, but it's getting really, really difficult. Um, society's perception of AI has been very skewed by the PR machinery of a handful of companies with amazing PR capabilities and because that number of companies drove scales and narrative, people think of scale first of, as a vector progress. But I think, you know, agentic workflows, um, uh, the way we build multimodal models, we have a lot of work to build concrete applications. I mean, there are multiple vectors of progress as well as wild cards like brand new technologies like diffusion models which are used to generate images for the most part. Will that also work for generating text? I think that's exciting. So I think there'll be multiple ways for AI to make progress.

You actually came up with the term agentic AI. What did you mean then?

So when I, uh, decided to start talk about agentic AI, which wasn't a thing when I started to use the term, my team was slightly annoyed at me. One of my team members that I won't name, he actually said, "Andrew, the world does not need you to make up another term." But I decided to do it anyway and for whatever reason, it stuck. And the reason I started to talk about agentic AI was because, um, uh, like couple years ago, I saw people were spending a lot of time debating, "Is this an agent? Is this not an agent? What is an agent?" And I felt there's a lot of good work, and there was a spectrum of degrees of agency where there are highly autonomous agents that could plan, take multiple steps if using, do a lot of stuff by themselves, and then things that were lower degrees of agency where it would prompt an LLM for effect in its output. And, and I felt like rather than debating this is an agent or not, let's just, um, say the degrees of agency and say it's all agentic so we can spend our time actually building this. So I started to push the term agentic AI. What I did not expect was that, uh, several months later, a bunch of marketers would get ahold of this term and use it as a sticker to stick it on everything in sight. And so I think the term agentic AI really took off. I feel like the marketing hype has gone like that insanely fast, but the real business progress has also been, you know, rapidly growing, but maybe not as fast as the marketing hype.