Andrew Ng

Our educational system globally has not been historically great in reskilling for newer job roles. We need a new social contract to do that. For India, lack of an incumbent structure might be an advantage, where it can use digital education to leapfrog.

Baidu and Google are great companies, but there are a lot of things you can do outside them. Just as electricity and the Internet transformed the world, I think the rise of modern A.I. technology will create a lot of opportunities both for new startups and for incumbent companies to transform.

Text input is certainly useful, but images and speech are a much more natural way for humans to express their queries. Infants learn to see and speak well before they learn to type. The same is true of human evolution - we've had spoken language for a long time compared to written language, which is a relatively recent development.

The Chinese market is very different. One of the things that I believe is that the biggest, hottest tech trend in China right now is O2O, or online-to-offline.

We think that many companies view Coursera as a quality, convenient, inexpensive way to continue employee development. Is there a contract with a company that might make sense? I don't have an answer to that yet.

Want to train a machine translation system? Train it on a gazillion pairs of sentences of parallel corpora, and that creates a lot of breakthrough results. Increasingly, I'm seeing results on small data where you want to try to take in results even if you have 1,000 images.

Baidu Research has three labs - two in Beijing that are already largely built up, and the Silicon Valley one is being built from scratch. We're hiring pretty rapidly, about one person a week, but we are about a month in, so honestly, we haven't done that much work yet.

I am always mission driven, and I always ask myself what I want to be working on, what project excites me the most. I figure that out and then find the best place to do that work.

Speech recognition today doesn't really work in noisy environments.

I had a strong interest in free online education, and I was interested in what videos and formats would work for it. A lot of education workers were very sceptical about what computer scientists were doing. It was only after the first visible success of MOOCs that they started to take it seriously.

When we automated away the elevator operator function, who knew that all the descendants of those operators would become social media marketers, machine learning engineers, and all these other jobs that we didn't even have a language to describe back then.

It takes a government to set up public-private partnerships and develop university programmes. I think this is the best path for India, given the rapid progress the country has already made and given the rapid progress we all hope India will continue to make.