Davos 2024: LLMs are hyper competitive, better to build GenAI apps: Andrew Ng's advice to AI startups

Andrew Ng is the founder and CEO of Landing AI, co-founder and and ex-CEO of Coursera. ,Jeff Maggioncalda is the current chief executive officer of Coursera

There is a huge untapped opportunity in budding generative AI applications over building large language models (LLMs), according to Andrew NG, the founder and CEO of Landing AI and former CEO of Coursera.

“There are so many more opportunities in applications of AI to healthcare, financial services, IT consulting, and so on. These have huge opportunities that relatively very few people are working on,” said Ng, speaking to Moneycontrol at Davos, where global leaders have gathered for the 54th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum.

According to the Landing AI founder, while there will be huge winners building LLMs, including some regional ones as well, the space is hyper competitive already.

US-based edtech platform Coursera’s chief executive officer Jeff Maggioncalda agreed and said that such domain-specific applications using domain-specific data will unlock a lot of value, and competitive advantage.

“Don't try to build the next LLM for the world, try to build some domain specific language models,” added Maggioncalda, in conversation with Moneycontrol at Davos.

He also believes that generative AI will birth a new wave of startups entering into the ecosystem but cautioned startups to take a more foundational approach while building for specific domains.

“There's going to be a lot of innovation with generative AI, but many of the startups are just going to be building features. It'll be difficult to build businesses, unless you're building foundation models,” Maggioncalda said.

This comes days after Maggioncalda launched a large catalogue of learning content in Hindi and AI-powered features in Delhi to make online learning more personalised and interactive for India, the second-largest market for Coursera globally.

Ng also expressed optimism about India's ability to contribute significantly to the world's efforts in generative AI, given its historically strong IT software ecosystem.

“India is actually in a very good position to quickly embrace the new skills in tech, but also more broadly and then to play a huge role in the generative AI world,” he added.