Andrew Ng

Andrew Yan-Tak Ng is a British-American computer scientist and entrepreneur whose work centers on machine learning and artificial intelligence. He helped create and lead Google Brain, later served as Baidu’s chief scientist, and cofounded the online education platforms Coursera and DeepLearning.AI. Through his courses, he has taught more than eight million people.

Ng was born in London in 1976. His father, Ronald Paul Ng, was a hematologist and lecturer at UCL Medical School; his mother, Tisa Ho, worked in arts administration for the London Film Festival. Both parents were immigrants from Hong Kong. The family moved back to Hong Kong when Ng was young, then to Singapore in 1984. He attended Raffles Institution there.

He earned a triple-major undergraduate degree in computer science, statistics, and economics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1997. During his studies, from 1996 to 1998, he did research at AT&T Bell Labs on reinforcement learning, model selection, and feature selection. He then received a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT in 1998, where he built the first publicly available, automatically indexed web-search engine for research papers—a precursor to CiteSeerX/ResearchIndex, focused on machine learning. In 2002, he completed his Ph.D. in computer science at UC Berkeley under Michael I. Jordan, with a thesis on shaping and policy search in reinforcement learning that remains widely cited.

Ng began his academic career as an assistant professor at Stanford in 2002, becoming an associate professor in 2009. He is now an adjunct professor in Stanford’s computer science and electrical engineering departments and formerly directed the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). His machine learning course, CS229, is the most popular on campus, sometimes enrolling over a thousand students. As of 2020, three of Coursera’s most popular courses were his: Machine Learning, AI for Everyone, and Neural Networks and Deep Learning. In 2008, his Stanford group was among the first in the U.S. to advocate using GPUs for deep learning—a controversial move at the time that later became standard. Since 2017, he has pushed for high-performance computing to further scale deep learning.

In 2012, Ng cofounded Coursera with Stanford colleague Daphne Koller and served as its CEO. The site launched with over 100,000 students signing up for his CS229A course. It has since become a leading massive open online course platform.

In industry, Ng worked at Google from 2011 to 2012, founding and directing the Google Brain Deep Learning Project with Jeff Dean, Greg Corrado, and Rajat Monga. He joined Baidu as chief scientist in 2014, leading research in big data and AI, setting up teams for facial recognition and a healthcare chatbot called Melody, and developing the DuerOS platform. He left Baidu in March 2017. Soon after, he launched DeepLearning.AI, a series of online deep learning courses, and founded LandingAI, which provides AI-powered SaaS products. In January 2018, he unveiled the AI Fund, raising $175 million to invest in AI startups. LandingAI secured $57 million in Series A funding in November 2021. In October 2024, the AI Fund made its first investment in India, backing healthcare startup Jivi.

Ng’s research spans machine learning, deep learning, machine perception, computer vision, and natural language processing. He has won best paper awards at conferences and made notable contributions to AI, computer vision, and robotics. During graduate school, he coauthored an influential paper with David M. Blei and Michael I. Jordan.

He was named to *Time*’s 100 Most Influential People in 2012, *Fast Company*’s Most Creative People in 2014, and the *Time*100 AI Most Influential People in 2023. In April 2024, Amazon announced his appointment to its board of directors.