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Published on 20.11.2025
Andrew Ng reports from AI Dev NYC about the community's optimism despite mixed AI sentiment. Waymo launches freeway self-driving taxis in the US, marking a major regulatory win. Kimi K2 Thinking leads open-weights LLMs in agentic benchmarks through interleaved reasoning and tool use. Anthropic's cyberattack report faces skepticism from security researchers questioning unprecedented automation claims. Self-Search Reinforcement Learning improves LLM knowledge retrieval by simulating web searches internally.
Andrew Ng shared reflections from AI Dev NYC, where the developer community gathered to code, learn, and connect. The event buzzed with energy around agentic AI, context engineering, and scaling applications—but the dominant impression was near-universal optimism about the field's trajectory.
This optimism persists despite broader societal ambivalence about AI. Many businesses have not yet achieved significant ROI from AI agents, with AI skeptics citing an MIT study claiming 95% of AI pilots fail (though Ng notes methodological flaws in this study). Yet at AI Dev, successful AI teams are seeing projects climb rapidly from a low base. The paradox: low AI penetration means both widespread failure and accelerating successes coexist.
What set AI Dev apart from typical conferences was the technical depth. Exhibitors praised the substantive engagement, noting attendees' deep understanding allowed nuanced discussions about observability in agentic workflows, context engineering for AI coding, and the proliferation of RL gyms for LLM training. This expertise lets the community see further into the future. Ng highlighted his collaboration with Kirsty Tan that began at a previous AI Dev and became AI advisory firm AI Aspire—demonstrating how in-person meetings spark opportunities.
A special moment came during a panel moderated by Nick Thompson, when Ng criticized US hostil
e rhetoric toward immigrants as "one of the worst moves" for AI competitiveness, receiving audience applause. The next AI Dev San Francisco on April 28-29, 2026, will scale up 3x again, continuing to foster connections that could become turning points for projects and careers.
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