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Google Brain co-founder and Stanford professor, Andrew Ng, spent 149 minutes explaining how to prompt AI in 2026 better than any paid prompting course on the market. This is what separates AI novices from power users: 1. "Think step by step" is dead advice. This was standard prompting wisdom as recently as 2023. Andrew says the models have outgrown it. "I no longer tell my AI model to think step by step. Instead, I'm more likely to just tell it to think hard. It knows what that means." The most-repeated prompting tip on the internet became obsolete while most people kept using it. 2. Power users have empathy for the AI. In an operational sense: they imagine being on the receiving end of their own prompt. "If you could put yourself in the shoes of someone getting instructions from you, you can ask yourself, will they know enough about you to do a good job on the task you're assigning them?" The best prompters anticipate what information the AI is missing. 3. Your biased questions get biased answers. Andrew tested what happens when you frame a question with your preferred answer baked in. A Washington Post study he cites found ChatGPT agreed with users 10 times more often than it disagreed. "If you give even a hint of what answer you're hoping for, there's a good chance the AI will just reflect back your preferences or your preconceptions." Load a question with your preferred outcome and you're paying for a mirror and calling it analysis. 4. Never write the final text first. Andrew Ng uses progressive outlining: outline first, critique the outline, iterate, expand to bullets, iterate again, and only then generate the final text. "Editing the outline is very high leverage because you can change just a few words of the outline and this will result in an entire section of the article changing." One edit at the outline level moves thousands of words. One edit at the sentence level moves one sentence. 5. Give feedback on options, not more instructions. Instead of writing a longer prompt, Andrew asks AI for 3 to 5 options, then critiques them. His feedback becomes the context. "One of the really good ways to figure out what additional context to give the AI is to give it feedback on the options it presents to you." Your reaction to AI's output tells it more about what you want than another paragraph of instructions. 6. AI defaults to Reddit. Steer it to better sources. Andrew cites data showing the most-cited website by AI models during web search is Reddit, followed by Wikipedia. "If you don't steer the model in terms of what types of sources you prefer, there's a chance that it'll tend to pull text from whatever is most available rather than what's most reliable." Ask for medical or financial information without specifying sources and you're getting Reddit-grade answers in professional packaging. 7. AI has jagged intelligence. No single model wins at everything. Different models excel at different tasks, and which one leads changes with every new release. Andrew tests the same prompt across multiple models. "There's some tasks where AI does poorer than human and some where it does much better than human and different AI models are jagged in different ways." You get better results testing across providers and updating your intuitions about which tool fits which task. Watch the full 149-minute course, then read the prompting playbook on GPT-5.6