
Opening a new chapter of my work in AI - davmre
https://medium.com/@andrewng/opening-a-new-chapter-of-my-work-in-ai-c6a4d1595d7b
======
chollida1
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.

~~~
irq11
...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
Or, 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
This 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
Don't executives ship...execution?

------
AndrewKemendo
_Just 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
> 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).

~~~
AndrewKemendo
The distinction should be made between training data and [actionable] data.

In the former case we are taking data, labeling it, then using it to build our
nets and models. You are correct to an extent that it's a usable model once
trained and that data is less important.

However, equally if not more important is the data that is being put into the
net to come out as a result/action. Arguably this data comes through the same
pipe as training data - and the pipes are similarly limited. So its ALWAYS
important because you can't take an action or classify or otherwise without
it.

When you add in the reinforcement mechanism, or later unsupervised techniques
then those data mechanisms blur between training and action data so the point
is moot. It's not a one run process in the long run, it's iterative and always
evolving based on the user.

~~~
jmmcd
If you don't have data to "put into the net" then you don't have a problem
that you want to solve.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
The key point is that it's about data friction. If you already have uploaded
all of your photos to google cloud, then any new tool or capability google
comes up with using a CNN, will be immediately applicable without you having
to do anything.

------
thewhitetulip
I 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.

~~~
a_d
>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
I actually hope he doesn't.

~~~
thewhitetulip
May I ask why?

------
Fricken
Ng'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
Googling 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.

------
jmcgough
Sadly, the post has no meaningful information beyond that he's resigning.

~~~
thewhitetulip
It almost reads as an advert to how Baidu has transformed into an AI
powerhouse.

~~~
Canada
Yes, and yet Baidu search is terrible.

------
shadowmint

        Baidu 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
>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?

------
erdojo
I 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.

~~~
Tepix
From [https://www.techinasia.com/ai-chief-scientist-andrew-ng-
resi...](https://www.techinasia.com/ai-chief-scientist-andrew-ng-resigns-
baidu)

“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!”

------
fermigier
Misleading title, because there is nothing about his "new chapter".

Correct title could have been "Closing the current chapter...".

------
drakenot
Is his Machine Learning course still relatively up to date? I was considering
devoting some time to it, or a course like it soon.

~~~
laughingman2
If 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.

~~~
skynode
I recommend this AI/ML learning method too. Practical first. Trust me, it'll
keep you from getting bored/sleepy.

And for the practicals, I'll also suggest going over some of the hands-on
examples at blog.algorithmia.com, especially if you have some Web dev
experience.

------
du_bing
Surprising, Andrew Ng leaves Baidu so fast.

~~~
randcraw
Frankly, 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.

------
sidcool
Big blow for Baidu. Wonder if he'll join Google again. They are the foremost
in AI.

~~~
ww520
Or Nvdia, for their hardware prowess in AI.

~~~
rspeer
Why would he work at a hardware company?

~~~
thom
Why sell a box that does nothing when you can sell a box that does something?

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viscountchocula
How does this compare to the SITA API? [https://www.developer.aero/Flight-
Information-API/API-Overvi...](https://www.developer.aero/Flight-Information-
API/API-Overview)

------
Tepix
I 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.

------
nyartsgnaw
Andrew 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
Was it less than a year? A "China suprise" syndrome I guess

------
BucketSort
He has been a huge influence on me. We partially have a community AI org
because his thoughts on democratizing AI.

