Quotes from Andrew Ng

Baidu and Google are great companies, but there are a lot of things you can do outside them. Just as electricity and the Internet transformed the world, I think the rise of modern A.I. technology will create a lot of opportunities both for new startups and for incumbent companies to transform.

Want to train a machine translation system? Train it on a gazillion pairs of sentences of parallel corpora, and that creates a lot of breakthrough results. Increasingly, I'm seeing results on small data where you want to try to take in results even if you have 1,000 images.

It is difficult to think of a major industry that AI will not transform. This includes healthcare, education, transportation, retail, communications, and agriculture. There are surprisingly clear paths for AI to make a big difference in all of these industries.

We're making this analogy that AI is the new electricity. Electricity transformed industries: agriculture, transportation, communication, manufacturing.

When you go to Japan, there is such a talent shortage that the debate about AI taking jobs is almost non-existent. The debate is, how can we automate this so we can get all the work done?

The Chinese market is very different. One of the things that I believe is that the biggest, hottest tech trend in China right now is O2O, or online-to-offline.

With human inspectors, it's difficult to get even the same person to make consistent judgments.

In English, there is one word for sister. In Chinese, there are two separate words, for elder and younger sister. This is actually a translation problem because if you see the word sister, you don't know how to translate it to Chinese because you don't know if it's an elder sister or younger.

One of my relatives had been asking me on how he could break into AI. For him to learn AI - deep-learning, technically - a lot of facts exist on the Internet, but it is difficult for someone to go and read the right combination of research papers and find blog posts and YouTube videos and figure out themselves on how to learn deep-learning.

The true value proposition of education is employment.

Our educational system globally has not been historically great in reskilling for newer job roles. We need a new social contract to do that. For India, lack of an incumbent structure might be an advantage, where it can use digital education to leapfrog.

I joined Baidu in 2014 to work on AI. Since then, Baidu's AI group has grown to roughly 1,300 people, which includes the 300-person Baidu Research. Our AI software is used every day by hundreds of millions of people.

I've been to so many manufacturing plants. I've yet to walk into one where I did not think AI solutions wouldn't help.

There are so many problems in the world worth working on and so many discoveries to make, you have to make a choice. My preference is to focus my efforts on solving problems that will help people.

Google Brain, which I led, was arguably the single biggest force for turning Google into a great A.I. company. I'm pretty sure I led the team that transformed Baidu as well. So one thing that really excites me is the potential for other companies to become great A.I. companies.

Deep-learning will transform every single industry. Healthcare and transportation will be transformed by deep-learning. I want to live in an AI-powered society. When anyone goes to see a doctor, I want AI to help that doctor provide higher quality and lower cost medical service. I want every five-year-old to have a personalised tutor.

I thought the best place to advance the AI mission is at Baidu.

I am always mission driven, and I always ask myself what I want to be working on, what project excites me the most. I figure that out and then find the best place to do that work.

No university is the best place to execute every mission and no one company the best place to execute every mission.

If a typical person can do a mental task with less than one second of thought, we can probably automate it using AI either now or in the near future.

Most of the value of deep learning today is in narrow domains where you can get a lot of data. Here's one example of something it cannot do: have a meaningful conversation.

I think that solving the job impact of AI will require significant private and public efforts. And I think that many people actually underestimate the impact of AI on jobs. Having said that, I think that if we work on it and provide the skill training needed, then there will be many new jobs created.

A single neuron in the brain is an incredibly complex machine that even today we don't understand. A single 'neuron' in a neural network is an incredibly simple mathematical function that captures a minuscule fraction of the complexity of a biological neuron.

If we can make computers more intelligent - and I want to be careful of AI hype - and understand the world and the environment better, it can make life so much better for many of us. Just as the Industrial Revolution freed up a lot of humanity from physical drudgery I think AI has the potential to free up humanity from a lot of the mental drudgery.