Academia and teaching Ng started working as an assistant professor at
Stanford University in 2002 and as an associate professor in 2009. Ng is a
professor at Stanford University departments of Computer Science and
electrical engineering. He served as the director of the
Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), where he taught students and undertook research related to
data mining,
big data, and machine learning. His machine learning course CS229 at Stanford is the most popular course offered on campus with over 1,000 students enrolling some years. As of 2020, three of the most popular courses on Coursera are Ng's: Machine Learning (#1), AI for Everyone (#5), Neural Networks and Deep Learning (#6). In 2008, his group at Stanford was one of the first in the US to start advocating the use of
GPUs in deep learning. 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. At the time it was a controversial and risky decision, but since then and following Ng's lead, GPUs have become a cornerstone in the field. Since 2017, Ng has been advocating the shift to
high-performance computing (HPC) for scaling up deep learning and accelerating progress in the field. 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. Today, several million people have enrolled in Coursera courses, making the site one of the leading
massive open online courses (MOOCs) in the world.
Industry From 2011 to 2012, he worked at
Google, where he founded and directed the
Google Brain Deep Learning Project with
Jeff Dean, Greg Corrado, and Rajat Monga. In 2014, he joined
Baidu as chief scientist, and carried out research related to big data and AI. There he set up several research teams for things like
facial recognition and Melody, an AI
chatbot for
healthcare. and other technologies that positioned Baidu ahead of Google in the discourse and development of AI. In March 2017, he announced his resignation from Baidu. He soon afterward launched DeepLearning.AI, an online series of deep learning courses (including the AI for Good Specialization). Then Ng launched LandingAI, which provides AI-powered
SaaS products. In January 2018, Ng unveiled the AI Fund, raising $175 million to invest in new
startups. In November 2021, LandingAI secured a $57 million round of series A funding led by McRock Capital, to help enterprises adopt AI. In October 2024, Ng's AI Fund made its first investment in India, backing AI healthcare startup Jivi, which uses AI for diagnoses, treatment recommendations, and administrative tasks. The investment highlights the growth of India's AI sector, expected to reach $22 billion by 2027.
Research Ng researches primarily in
machine learning,
deep learning,
machine perception,
computer vision, and
natural language processing; and is one of the world's most famous and influential computer scientists. 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. 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. His early work includes the Stanford Autonomous Helicopter project, which developed one of the most capable autonomous helicopters in the world. He was the leading scientist and principal investigator on the STAIR (Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot) project, which resulted in
Robot Operating System (ROS), a widely used
open source software robotics platform. His vision to build an AI robot and put a robot in every home inspired Scott Hassan to back him and create
Willow Garage. He is also one of the founding team members for the Stanford WordNet project, which uses machine learning to expand the
Princeton WordNet database created by
Christiane Fellbaum. In 2011, Ng founded the
Google Brain project at
Google, which developed large-scale artificial
neural networks using Google's distributed computing infrastructure. Among its notable results was a neural network trained using
deep learning algorithms on 16,000
CPU cores, which learned to recognize cats after watching only
YouTube videos, and without ever having been told what a "cat" is. He has emphasized the importance of expanding access to AI education, stating that empowering people around the world to use AI tools is essential to building AI applications. In a June 2024 interview with the
Financial Times, Ng expressed concerns about proposed AI legislation in California that would have required developers to implement safety mechanisms such as a "kill switch" for advanced models. He described the bill as creating "massive liabilities for science-fiction risks" and said it "stokes fear in anyone daring to innovate." Other critics argued the bill would impose burdens on
open-source developers and smaller AI companies. The bill was ultimately vetoed by Governor
Gavin Newsom in September 2024. == Online education: massive open online course ==