Skip to main content

Artificial intelligence genius Andrew Ng has another AI project in the works

A logo for the new deeplearning.ai company
Image used with permission by copyright holder
He’s been called one of the “foremost thinkers on the topic of artificial intelligence,” so it’s no surprise that Andrew Ng — the cofounder of Coursera, the lead developer of Stanford University’s main Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platform, and the founder of the Google Brain project — is starting another AI company of his own now that he’s left Baidu. The resume of this impressive entrepreneur reads like a laundry list of some of the most impressive achievements in AI technology, and it seems safe to assume that Ng’s newest venture, known only as deeplearning.ai, won’t disappoint.

Launching my new project! Hope will help many of you: deeplearning.ai More announcements soon. #deeplearniNgAI pic.twitter.com/EsZecJfbrf

— Andrew Ng (@AndrewYNg) June 23, 2017

While Ng has founded and led many of his own projects in the past, he was most recently attached to another behemoth of a company — Chinese web giant Baidu. There, Ng was chief scientist and headed the company’s (what else) Artificial Intelligence Group, turning the Beijing-based giant into one of only a handful of companies in the world with expertise in each of the major AI categories: speech, natural language processing, computer vision, machine learning, and knowledge graph. Ng’s team was also responsible for bringing two new business groups into the company — autonomous driving and the DuerOS Conversational Computing platform.

Three months ago, Ng announced his departure from the company, noting in a Medium post, “Baidu’s AI is incredibly strong, and the team is stacked up and down with talent; I am confident AI at Baidu will continue to flourish. After Baidu, I am excited to continue working toward the AI transformation of our society and the use of AI to make life better for everyone.”

At the time, he told Forbes that his future plans were still in flux: “I am looking into quite a few ideas in parallel, and exploring new AI businesses that I can build. One thing that excites me is finding ways to support the global AI community so that people everywhere can access the knowledge and tools that they need to make AI transformations.”

And that may just be what deeplearning.ai is all about. In his Twitter announcement, Ng said only that he hoped the company would help “many of you,” and promised more announcements soon. Until then, we’ll wait with bated breath.

Editors' Recommendations

Lulu Chang
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Fascinated by the effects of technology on human interaction, Lulu believes that if her parents can use your new app…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more