Andrew Ng

“I believe that the ability to innovate and to be creative are teachable processes. There are ways by which people can systematically innovate or systematically become creative.”

“Machine learning is the most popular course for people from India. There is a window of time when India can embrace and capture a large fraction of the AI opportunity. But it will not remain open for ever.”

“People change jobs much more often, and therefore, companies, on average, invest less in employee development.”

“The true value proposition of education is employment.”

“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.”

“I find it a very encouraging sign for a society if employers are bringing online education to their companies, helping employees gain more knowledge.”

“One of the things that Baidu did well early on was to create an internal platform for deep learning. What that did was enable engineers all across the company, including people who were not AI researchers, to leverage deep learning in all sorts of creative ways - applications that an AI researcher like me never would have thought of.”

“Silicon Valley and Beijing are the leading hubs of AI, followed by the U.K. and Canada. I am seeing a lot of excitement in India, going by the number of people who are taking Coursera courses on AI.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Animals see a video of the world. If an animal were only to see still images, how would its vision develop? Neuroscientists have run experiments in cats in a dark environment with a strobe so it can only see still images - and those cats' visual systems actually underdevelop. So motion is important, but what is the algorithm?”

“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 most trusted way to keep moving up that value chain is to keep investing in individuals - to help them grow in knowledge and skills. Education is hard. It takes individuals to do the hard work.”

“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.”

“India has a large base of tech talent, and I hope that a lot of AI machine learning education online will allow Indian software professionals to break into AI.”

“The biggest ethical challenge AI is facing is jobs. You have to reskill your workforce not just to create a wealthier society but a fairer one. A lot of call centre jobs will go away, and a radiologist's job will be transformed.”

“With the Google Brain project, we made the decision to build deep learning processes on top of Google's existing infrastructure.”

“Despite all the hype and excitement about AI, it's still extremely limited today relative to what human intelligence is.”

“In terms of building consumer products, the U.S. and China are ahead of India. The interesting opportunity for India is whenever there is a disruption in technology, it gives every country a chance to leapfrog and take a lead. To take an example, China is leaping ahead in growing the China electric vehicle ecosystem.”

“In healthcare, we are beginning to see that AI can read the radiology images better than most radiologists. In education, we have a lot of data, and companies like Coursera are putting up a lot of content online.”