Profile

Andrew Ng, born in London in 1976, is an American computer scientist. He earned a bachelor’s degree at Carnegie Mellon University, a master’s at MIT and a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, where his advisor was the machine learning researcher Michael I. Jordan.

He then joined the Stanford faculty, directed the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, and remains an adjunct professor there. In 2011 he co-founded Google Brain, Google’s deep learning research project. In 2012 he co-founded the online learning platform Coursera with Daphne Koller. From 2014 to 2017 he was chief scientist at Baidu. Since then he has founded DeepLearning.AI and Landing AI and leads the AI venture studio AI Fund. He joined Amazon’s board of directors in 2024.

Key contributions

His early research included substantial work on reinforcement learning. His Stanford team used it to fly autonomous helicopters through complex aerobatic manoeuvres, now a classic example in the field. He was also among the early advocates of training large deep neural networks on GPUs.

At Google Brain, he and his team trained a neural network on a large computing cluster that learned, without labels, to recognise cats from a huge collection of video frames. The experiment made the importance of scale in deep learning easy to grasp and helped spur Google’s large investment in the area.

At Baidu he built up the company’s AI research organisation, covering speech recognition, autonomous driving and other areas.

Notable work

Ng’s most far-reaching work is his teaching. The machine learning course he taught at Stanford was put online and became one of Coursera’s first and most popular courses. Through DeepLearning.AI he later released the Deep Learning Specialization and many short courses on generative AI and building with large models. For a great many engineers, these courses were the first step into AI.

On the industry side, Landing AI focuses on applying computer vision in manufacturing and other sectors, while AI Fund incubates AI start-ups as a venture studio. His DeepLearning.AI newsletter keeps practitioners up to date on the field.

Honours

  • 2009 IJCAI Computers and Thought Award.
  • Named to the TIME 100 list of the most influential people.
  • Named to the TIME100 AI list in 2023.

Influence

What sets Ng apart is that he is active in research, education and industry all at once. His line “AI is the new electricity” captures his view that AI will reach into nearly every industry, as electricity did.

His courses helped learners from many countries and backgrounds get started in machine learning, effectively training a generation of the AI workforce. More recently he has championed “data-centric AI,” arguing that improving data quality often beats tweaking the model, and he talks often about agentic workflows, encouraging developers to build real applications. In regulatory debates he generally supports open source and argues that rules should target specific applications rather than the underlying technology.