Andrew Ng doesn’t sound like someone caught up in the hype machine. When he talks about AI, the emphasis is on process, talent, and the gritty details of building. Speaking on the No Priors podcast, Ng laid out why AI’s future won’t be decided by scale alone.
Take his view on where AI progress comes from. “There is probably a little bit more juice out of the scalability lemon to be squeezed,” he said, but that is hardly the only path forward. Instead, Ng sees “multiple vectors of progress,” from multimodal models to agentic workflows, even down to experiments in how diffusion models might cross over from generating images to generating text.
That phrase, agentic AI, is one he coined. His team initially pushed back. “One of my team members…said, ‘Andrew, the world does not need you to make up another term,’ but I decided to do it anyway.” For Ng, the point was to move beyond endless debates over definitions. “Rather than debating, ‘Is this agent or not?,’ let’s just say the degrees of agency and say it’s all agentic so you spend our time actually building this.”
