Andrew Yan-Tak Ng

“Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks.”

“So, ask yourself: If what you're working on succeeds beyond your wildest dreams, would you have significantly helped other people? If not, then keep searching for something else to work on. Otherwise you're not living up to your full potential.””

“No one knows what the right algorithm is, but it gives us hope that if we can discover some crude approximation of whatever this algorithm is and implement it on a computer, that can help us make a lot of progress.””

““It seemed really amazing that you could write a few lines of code and have it learn to do interesting things.””

““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.”

“Imagine if your success in life is determined only by your guts, your hard work, and your willpower, and not by the wealth of your parents. I think it'll be a much more interesting world. I think this could change the way the planet is run””

“Imagine if we can just talk to our computers and have it understand, ‘Please schedule a meeting with Bob for next week.’ Or if each child could have a personalized tutor. Or if self-driving cars could save all of us hours of driving.””

““If you want to publish data, you should do it to share knowledge.””

““If you show a poetry professor your shiny new multiple choice teaching technology, he will invite you to exit his office.””

“Fearing a rise of killer robots is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars.””

““Education is not about thinning the herd. Education is about helping every student succeed.””

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

“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.”

“AI has been making tremendous progress in machine translation, self-driving cars, etc. Basically, all the progress I see is in specialised intelligence. It might be hundreds or thousands of years or, if there is an unexpected breakthrough, decades.”

““A lot of the progress in machine learning – and this is an unpopular opinion in academia – is driven by an increase in both computing power and data. An analogy is to building a space rocket: You need a huge rocket engine, and you need a lot of fuel.””

““A lot of the game of AI today is finding the appropriate business context to fit it in. I love technology. It opens up lots of opportunities. But in the end, technology needs to be contextualized and fit into a business use case.””