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Opening a new chapter of my work in AI
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- thewhitetulip 10y agoI didn't find a single reference other than this as to what he is going to do post resigning. >I will also explore new ways to support all of you in the global AI community, so that we can all work together to bring this AI-powered society to fruition. It is true that AI is the new electricity which will change practically everything in our lives and it is good to see that alliances like OpenAI are forming to democratize the knowledge, this is because giant companies hold a monopoly, they are the only ones who have the sufficient data to do any meaningful research at all.
- dilemma 10y agoOpenAI isn't open source.
- a_d 10y ago>it is good to see that alliances like OpenAI are forming to democratize the knowledge... Very true! I hope he joins OpenAI and helps achieve their mission [1]. It would be a huge boost to their efforts. [1] https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/ https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/
- amauta 10y agoI actually hope he doesn't.
- thewhitetulip 10y agoMay I ask why?
- dirtyaura 10y agoIt's similar sentiment that Jeremy Howard presented. It sounds that they both see AI such a big societal change that working on a single startup / company isn't enough for them.
- chollida1 10y agoWow, I'm amazed at Andrew's list of accomplishments. I mean any one of these would be a career capstone for most people - Stanford Professor - Founding lead of the Google Brain project - Author of one of the most famous and loved MOOC's - Head of AI for Baidu, built up the AI team in both China and the US. - Founder of Coursera And I see from wikipedia that he and I are roughly the same age :( Engineers are often seen as a cost center for most businesses, which means you'll eventually hit a compensation ceiling If you want to elevate yourself into one of the engineers you hear about that is able to break through the compensation ceiling then the below is one of the best ways to do so..... > My team birthed one new business unit per year each of the last two years If you can directly tie yourself to a Pnl then you'll always have more options than someone who is considered a cost center. I hope that what ever he does, he takes some time of first if he needs it. I'd hate for someone like this to get burnt out.
- manojlds 10y agoI didn't know he was a founder of Coursera. I thought he mentioned Coursera because of the MOOC <facepalm>
- visarga 10y agoAfter making his first video course, he teamed up with Daphne Koller and made Coursera as a platform for courses.
- irq11 10y ago...and all that (excluding the professor part) since 2011! Boy, talk about working fast! In case you can't tell, there's a great big sarcasm tag there. There is absolutely no way that the guy has contributed substantially to all of those things in less than six years. Sometimes, people get a reputation for something, and then leverage that into a slingshot of career advancement. Good for him, but the people who are doing the actual work of developing this stuff can easily spend six years on a single problem, so it's helpful to maintain perspective.
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- Fricken 10y agoNg's wife's company, Drive.ai, has made more progress in less time and with fewer resources than anybody in the autonomous driving space. So it's probably a billion dollar company. I wonder if that has anything to do with it. There's a lot of money in autonomous driving startups that can deliver results.
- Hydraulix989 10y agoGoogling around, I haven't seen any substantial evidence of any of your claims. It's hard to separate the hype from the reality when hearing anything about the self-driving car space.
- throwaway418234 10y agoDefinitely appears to be on a good trajectory, but the tech was definitely not developed from scratch. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.01716.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.01716.pdf
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- du_bing 10y agoSurprising, Andrew Ng leaves Baidu so fast.
- randcraw 10y agoFrankly, I wonder why Dr Ng stayed at Baidu so long. Without question, Baidu's dominance over search plays two very painful roles: 1) they're the cutting edge of China's online civilian spy apparatus, and 2) they're the gatekeeper for news and dissemination of gov't propaganda. If you search the web or visit links sponsored by Baidu, either you will find what the government wants you to find or you will be identified as an outlier, and at best, labeled as a potential threat and tracked. It's impossible to imagine that Baidu does not place the names of web denizens matching certain profiles on threat databases thus altering the trajectory of their lives accordingly (and invisibly). Personally, I can't imagine anyone of conscience working long for an employer so committed to diminish the freedoms of thought and speech. I applaud Dr Ng for his departure.
- jmcgough 10y agoSadly, the post has no meaningful information beyond that he's resigning.
- thewhitetulip 10y agoIt almost reads as an advert to how Baidu has transformed into an AI powerhouse.
- Canada 10y agoYes, and yet Baidu search is terrible.
- sidcool 10y agoBig blow for Baidu. Wonder if he'll join Google again. They are the foremost in AI.
- drakenot 10y agoIs his Machine Learning course still relatively up to date? I was considering devoting some time to it, or a course like it soon.
- BucketSort 10y agoIt's a good foundations course. Read Ian Goodfellows Deep Learning book for a more modern and extensive treatment.
- roque 10y agoYes. It may not cover some of the most recent advances (e.g. deep learning) but it lays the foundations required to understand them. Besides, it is really really accessible. And fun. I enjoyed taking the class.
- jbchoo 10y agoYes his course is good. Not sure if up to date. But worth doing. I am doing it now.
- laughingman2 10y agoIf you are planning to take it, I would suggest a different approach which I have started. 1. Do Practical Deep Learning For Coders:- http://course.fast.ai/ http://course.fast.ai/ To take a plunge directly into deep learning AI, this course has rave reviews. This course will allow you to do practical industry level stuff first, then learn theory behind it, rather than other way. Course description: >This 7-week course is designed for anyone with at least a year of coding experience, and some memory of high-school math. You will start with step one—learning how to get a GPU server online suitable for deep learning—and go all the way through to creating state of the art, highly practical, models for computer vision, natural language processing, and recommendation systems. There are around 20 hours of lessons, and you should plan to spend around 10 hours a week for 7 weeks to complete the material. The course is based on lessons recorded during the first certificate course at The Data Institute at USF. Part 2 will be taught at the Data Institute from Feb 27, 2017, and will be available online around May 2017. 2. Read http://www.deeplearningbook.org/ http://www.deeplearningbook.org/ to gain the relevant math behind it. If you don't know some of the math like calculus or linear algebra presented in the book, learn as you read it from sources like Khan academy. Now we are up to date on practical side of things, especially deep learning part. We can move on to gain a more generalized and rigorous outlook on various machine learning techniques. 3. Do https://see.stanford.edu/Course/CS229/ https://see.stanford.edu/Course/CS229/ - CS229 By Andrew NG , its more rigorous, and complete compared to coursera course. And coursera course is not I think within a year (max) just this coursework plan would give a strong foundations on practical, theoretical side of things in AI. I get distracted trying to learn so many stuff at once, (clojure , sicp, haskell, advanced algo) etc etc. So I made this lesson plan to follow as I am interested in AI the most.
- shadowmint 10y agoBaidu is now one of the few companies with world-class expertise in every major AI area: speech, NLP, computer vision, machine learning, knowledge graph. Just idly, I find it interesting that practical applications of this technology seem to often funnel down to just this subset. There's a lot of room to apply machine learning to solve actual problems that many people have, but often its unclear that doing so would end up with results that are significantly better than traditional approaches; or how to achieve those results, tangibly. I'm sure we haven't heard the last of Andrew Ng; there are a lot of people who want those sorts of skills.
- a_bonobo 10y ago>often its unclear that doing so would end up with results that are significantly better than traditional approaches If Deep Learning can approximate any function, does that mean that in some cases it ends up approximating the output of traditional approaches?
- lsseckman 10y agoit was only after your comment that I'm noticing: talking, listening, understanding, seeing and remembering. I wonder if we're just too focused on doing things that people do.
- AndrewKemendo 10y agoJust as electricity transformed many industries roughly 100 years ago, AI will also now change nearly every major industry This is an underrated point, and something I don't think most people outside of the high level Machine Learning/AI world take seriously. It's also one of the biggest challenges for the industry going forward because of natural monopolies. I say that because if AI is electricity then data is the coal/oil that drives it. The big technology players have a massive advantage in their ability to build and deploy tools that collect the data, and then bring it back to be turned into "electricity." If we aren't careful they will be the only groups who can make progress and show actual real world ML driven capabilities - making the barriers to entry even higher. If you just look at the computer vision space, to do really good Machine Vision you need a LOT of novel image data and the primary platforms creating image content are largely owned by the top 5 players in the form of collection (smartphones) and warehousing (cloud servers). I'm not sure if there are solutions here that make it possible for a lot of companies to do really well - everyone will just be bought up or out competed by the bigs once the big ones notice a threat on the horizon.
- visarga 10y ago> AI is electricity then data is the coal/oil that drives it. The big technology players have a massive advantage in their ability to build and deploy tools that collect the data, and then bring it back to be turned into "electricity." Data is important now, but when we have solved vision, speech, text and robotics to a decent degree, data won't matter as much. The great thing about AI is that we can cheaply copy already trained models or already labeled datasets. There aren't so many datasets needed to solve the most interesting and financially profitable few problems. Of course, there will always be fringe projects where more data is needed, but the main applications will be in the commons. You can copy an AI model if you can talk to it (use it to produce sample outputs). Any model could be copied in a dataset and transferred into another model. The great thing about machine learning is that it learns directly from data, so it's cheap to copy by tracing the inputs and outputs of other public AIs, just as current AIs are taught by tracing the inputs and outputs of people (supervision).
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- BucketSort 10y agoHe has been a huge influence on me. We partially have a community AI org because his thoughts on democratizing AI.
- erdojo 10y agoI haven't seen any comment or quotes yet from Baidu (please correct me if I'm wring!). Amicable high profile departures like this are almost always coordinated between the person leaving and the company, with joint statements. Not saying it's not amicable, but I do find that, and the fact he's not sharing his next move, a little odd. I also saw a FB thread that seemed to suggest this may have been a surprise to some of his colleagues. Take that with a grain of salt though - I don't know the people on the thread and they were vague. I just got the sense it was news to them.
- otoburb 10y agoHigh-profile departures are hard to read because leadership teams are usually (and should be) paranoid about the effect on morale. Also, as a general rule, clean breaks with little to no warning are easier to digest for the rest of the company rather than long, drawn out affairs where gossip can be given life through dint of "overhearing" the subject (almost incorrectly or out of context) in the hallway.
- Tepix 10y agoFrom https://www.techinasia.com/ai-chief-scientist-andrew-ng-resigns-baidu https://www.techinasia.com/ai-chief-scientist-andrew-ng-resi... “Andrew joined Baidu because of our shared pursuit for the future of AI,” stated Baidu on its official Weibo account, China’s answer to Twitter. “We still have this goal, which is to push forward the development of AI and make life in the future more beautiful.” “Despite our regrets, we send our thanks and blessings! We wish Andrew even greater success in the future, and hope all goes well!”
- nyartsgnaw 10y agoAndrew left just after Qi Lu was hired as COO in Baidu. Hopefully, Qi Lu can bring some shining product out of those great techniques, encouraging the AI team left behind.
- baybal2 10y agoWas it less than a year? A "China suprise" syndrome I guess
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- viscountchocula 10y agoHow does this compare to the SITA API? https://www.developer.aero/Flight-Information-API/API-Overview https://www.developer.aero/Flight-Information-API/API-Overvi...
- Tepix 10y agoI wonder if Baidu hiring Qi Lu as COO in January has anything to do with it? He has been called "a leading authority in the field of artificial intelligence". OTOH Ng specifically thanked Lu Qi on twitter. Oh well, I guess eventually we'll know more.
- fermigier 10y agoMisleading title, because there is nothing about his "new chapter". Correct title could have been "Closing the current chapter...".
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