Andrew Ng

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. ”

A lot of the progress in machine learning - and this is an unpopular opinion in academia - is driven by an increase in both computing power and data. An analogy is to building a space rocket: You need a huge rocket engine, and you need a lot of fuel. ”

A single neuron in the brain is an incredibly complex machine that even today we don't understand. A single 'neuron' in a neural network is an incredibly simple mathematical function that captures a minuscule fraction of the complexity of a biological neuron. ”