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Wow, 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 o
by chollida1 10y ago
Wow, 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.
- GuiA 10y agoOr, perhaps a little less cynically, that it takes a long time for your work to reach a critical mass, but past that point many factors come into play that allow you to ship stuff at a much increased pace: your work has a much higher visibility, more people are willing to collaborate with you, you have easier acccess to grants, etc
- irq11 10y agoThis guy is an executive. He isn't "shipping" anything, and it isn't cynical to say that. Engineers tend to think about these things as if the world is a meritocracy based on your individual contributions. But for a lot of famous people, 80% of their contribution comes from attaching their name to the management page. I agree with you that none of this would be possible without the years of work he did to build his reputation. But people shouldn't feel bad just because a well-known person has lots of flash on their resume. This stuff accumulates at an unnatural rate.
- snikeris 10y agoDon't executives ship...execution?
- amygdyl 10y agoBecome Stanford professor > Get prominent job > show you're cool > Get invited to do things! But I doubt his work rate and energy was any less before, just as you say, it's visibility. And very cool. Maybe we should all be on the lookout for at least one career move, that gains us a relative boost in visibility, even at the expense of other desiderata.
- jobigoud 10y agoOnly reasonable explanation is that he has a secret AGI working for him in the shadow.
- EGreg 10y agoAmazing guy, I must say! Like Nicola Tesla ... it's no coincidence he says AI is the new electricity.
- throwaway418234 10y agoTesla was considered a kook in his days - he definitely wasn't mainstream.
- EGreg 10y agoYou kidding? He was well known in all the celebrity circles, lived it up in the middle of Manhattan and had Gatsby-like parties. Andrew Ng is mainstream? People know his name?
- JabavuAdams 10y agoReally effective people can enter a positive reinforcement loop where they just go exponential.
- melling 10y agoI really enjoyed this Andrew Ng talk: https://youtu.be/21EiKfQYZXc https://youtu.be/21EiKfQYZXc Some excerpts: Anti-Evil AI drives funding: https://youtu.be/21EiKfQYZXc?t=37m20s https://youtu.be/21EiKfQYZXc?t=37m20s Radiologist will be impacted: https://youtu.be/21EiKfQYZXc?t=57m38s https://youtu.be/21EiKfQYZXc?t=57m38s Against Basic Income: https://youtu.be/21EiKfQYZXc?t=1h1m57s https://youtu.be/21EiKfQYZXc?t=1h1m57s Trolley Problem (who dies): https://youtu.be/21EiKfQYZXc?t=1h25m50s https://youtu.be/21EiKfQYZXc?t=1h25m50s
- throwaway418234 10y agoI don't mean to put down Andrew's achievements, but once you have a dense enough (high-impact) network, these things appear to happen on their own. Also note: Andrew's wife is the founder of Drive.ai (and the other two founders are his students).
- backpropaganda 10y agoThe smartest thing Andrew has done is to hire a PR agent right after he did the ml-class MOOC, and never breathed a day without consulting him/her ever since.
- shmolyneaux 10y agoDo you have a source for this? Searching doesn't yield any results.
- Gargoyle 10y agoAnd coincidentally building a portfolio with lots of stock grants at more than one of our coming AI overlords. Not a bad plan for the future!