He’s called for semiconductor export controls to China, drawing a public rebuke from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
Anthropic will thus be a barometer of AI’s progress, rising and falling on the strength of the technology.
He was interested almost entirely in math and physics. When the dot-com boom exploded around him in his high school years, it barely registered. “Writing some website actually had no interest to me whatsoever,” he tells me. “I was interested in discovering fundamental scientific truth.”
At Baidu, the AI team’s progress became seeds of its undoing. Turf battles broke out within the company over control of its increasingly valuable technology, know-how, and resources. Eventually, meddling from powerbrokers in China sparked a talent exodus and the lab fell apart. Andrew Ng declined to comment.
“The leaders of a company, they have to be trustworthy people,” he says. “They have to be people whose motivations are sincere, no matter how much you're driving forward the company technically. If you're working for someone whose motivations are not sincere, who's not an honest person, who does not truly want to make the world better, it's not going to work. You're just contributing to something bad.”
The endless drive to scale ends up covering the planet with solar panels and datacenters.
Here’s a cheat sheet of questions I ask myself when reviewing code: How does this code fit into the rest of the system? What’s its interaction with other parts of the codebase? How does it affect the overall architecture? Does it impact future planned work?
The goal shouldn’t be to merge as quickly as possible, but to accept code that is of high quality. Otherwise, what’s the point of a code review in the first place? That’s a mindset shift that’s important to make.