Andrew Yan-Tak Ng (Chinese: 吳恩達; born April 18, 1976[2]) is a British-American computer scientist and technology entrepreneur focusing on machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI).

[3] Ng was a cofounder and head of Google Brain and was the former Chief Scientist at Baidu, building the company's Artificial Intelligence Group into a team of several thousand people.

[15] In 1997, he earned his undergraduate degree with a triple major in computer science, statistics, and economics from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

[citation needed] The rationale was that an efficient computation infrastructure could speed up statistical model training by orders of magnitude, ameliorating some of the scaling issues associated with big data.

Since 2017, Ng has been advocating the shift to high-performance computing (HPC) for scaling up deep learning and accelerating progress in the field.

[citation needed] In 2012, along with Stanford computer scientist Daphne Koller he cofounded and was CEO of Coursera, a website that offers free online courses to everyone.

[3][30] He soon afterward launched DeepLearning.AI, an online series of deep learning courses (including the AI for Good Specialization).

[33] In November 2021, Landing AI secured a $57 million round of series A funding led by McRock Capital, to help manufacturers adopt computer vision.

[35] He's frequently won best paper awards at academic conferences and has had a huge impact on the field of AI, computer vision, and robotics.

[36][37] During graduate school, together with David M. Blei and Michael I. Jordan, Ng co-authored the influential paper that introduced latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) for his thesis on reinforcement learning for drones.

[47] In 2011, Stanford launched a total of three massive open online course (MOOCs) on machine learning (CS229a), databases, and AI, taught by Ng, Peter Norvig, Sebastian Thrun, and Jennifer Widom.

[49] By 2023, Ng has notably expanded access to AI education, with an estimated 8 million individuals worldwide taking his courses via platforms like DeepLearning.AI and Coursera.

Ng taught one of these courses, "Machine Learning", which includes his video lectures, along with the student materials used in the Stanford CS229 class.

The ml-class and db-class ran on a platform developed by students, including Frank Chen, Jiquan Ngiam, Chuan-Yu Foo, and Yifan Mai.

One of the students (Frank Chen) claims another one (Jiquan Ngiam) frequently stranded him in the Stanford building and refused to give him a ride back to his dorm until very late at night so he had no choice but to stick around and keep working.

This is a non-technical course designed to help people understand AI's impact on society and its benefits and costs for companies, as well as how they can navigate through this technological revolution.

[53] Ng is the chair of the board for Woebot Labs, a psychological clinic that uses data science to provide cognitive behavioral therapy.

[16] He has given invited talks at NASA, Google, Microsoft, Lockheed Martin, the Max Planck Society, Stanford, Princeton, UPenn, Cornell, MIT, UC Berkeley, and dozens of other universities.

[71] Ng contributed one chapter to Architects of Intelligence: The Truth About AI from the People Building it (2018) by the American futurist Martin Ford.

Ng thinks that the real threat is contemplating the future of work: "Rather than being distracted by evil killer robots, the challenge to labor caused by these machines is a conversation that academia and industry and government should have.

[citation needed] In a December 2023 Financial Times interview, Ng highlighted concerns regarding the impact of potential regulations on open-source AI, emphasizing how reporting, licensing, and liability risks could unfairly burden smaller firms and stifle innovation.

Ng advocated for carefully designed regulations to prevent obstacles to the development and distribution of beneficial AI technologies.