# the-batch

In The Batch Issue 341, Andrew Ng casually dropped that he's not only stopped writing code — he's 'long stopped reading generated code.' He now operates at a higher abstraction level, directing coding agents instead of looking at syntax. He's also spotted a new job category emerging: 'X Engineers' — Recruiting Engineers, Marketing Engineers — people embedded in business functions who build software using AI. This is the most radical statement about the future of programming from AI's most influential educator.

Liquid AI's LFM2.5-1.2B-Thinking (1.17B param, 32K context) runs on-device (<1GB mem). Claims to match/beat Qwen3-1.7B on reasoning, with faster decoding & fewer tokens. Strong for tool-calling/data extraction, but weaker on knowledge-heavy tasks.

SleepFM, a multimodal sleep foundation model (585k+ hrs PSG data), predicts 130+ conditions, showing strong results for stroke, heart failure, & dementia risk. It's about earlier, scaled risk detection, not replacing doctors.

White House EO mandates 180-day AI Action Plan, shifting US strategy from risk-first to competition-first. Agencies to revise policies impeding competitiveness, re-centering on practical AI progress over hypothetical risks.

Andrew Ng attended the Sundance Film Festival to understand Hollywood's AI anxieties — copyright fears, union fights, and a deep sense of powerlessness — but also found surprising common ground.

SpaceX acquired xAI to form the world's most valuable private company ($1.25 trillion). Beyond giving xAI cash to compete with OpenAI and friends, Musk wants to build solar-powered data centers in space — but the physics of heat dissipation and space debris might be harder problems than training LLMs.

Former OpenAI policy chief Miles Brundage founded Averi, a nonprofit backed by 28 institutions including MIT and Stanford. Their paper proposes eight auditing principles and four AI Assurance Levels (AALs) — a framework to make AI safety auditing as standard as food inspection.

Harvard's Dr. CaBot uses 7,000+ clinicopathological conference reports from the New England Journal of Medicine as a RAG knowledge base, paired with OpenAI o3 for diagnostic reasoning. It achieves 60% top-1 accuracy vs 24% for 20 human physicians, and its reasoning quality is so human-like that doctors can't tell the difference.