Seeing more bad Al regulation than good: Andrew Ng

The OpenAI fracas that played out over the past week or so will result in investors shying away from "clever arguments for very innovative governance structures", Andrew Ng, a British-American computer scientist and entrepreneur, and a global thought leader in artificial intelligence (AI), said.

- Leslie D'Monte

Ng, the founder of DeepLearning. AI and chairman and co-founder of Coursera, and holding several other titles, feels good regulation of Al is needed, but he's seeing more of bad regulation around the world. In an interview, he said exceptions abound in Asia, where few nations have bought into the Al-extinction hype. He likes Asia's, and India's, approach to AI regulation "with a light touch".

Ng believes generative Al is "absolutely safe enough for many applications", and advises any company that does a lot of knowledge work to embrace it quickly.

On the matter of jobs, he said generative AI can currently augment or automate just a small fraction of a job, "let's say, 20% of someone's job". Companies need to figure out which 20% that represents for them, and then use it to boost productivity.

Ng also dismisses talk of the coming age of AGI (artificial general intelligence) or 'sentient' AI, and argues that if companies and governments accept the most widely accepted definition of AGI, which is that AI "would do any intellectual task that a human could do", then the world is at least 30-50 years away from that.

Andrew Ng, the founding lead of the Google Brain team and former chief scientist at Baidu, juggles multiple roles as a teacher, entrepreneur, and investor. He is currently the founder of DeepLearning.AI--an edtech company, founder & CEO of Landing AI--a software provider for industrial automation and manufacturing, general partner at AI Fund, and chairman and co-founder of Coursera, besides being an adjunct professor at Stanford University’s Computer Science Department. In an interview, he shares his views on the OpenAI fracas, loss of jobs to generative artificial intelligence (AI), the heated debate around artificial general intelligence (AGI), and global regulation of AI, among other things. Edited excerpts:

Please share some quick thoughts on the developments at OpenAI.