Opening a new chapter of my work in AI

Wow, I&#x27;m amazed at Andrew&#x27;s list of accomplishments. I mean any one of these would be a career capstone for most people<p>- Stanford Professor<p>- Founding lead of the Google Brain project<p>- Author of one of the most famous and loved MOOC&#x27;s<p>- Head of AI for Baidu, built up the AI team in both China and the US.<p>- Founder of Coursera<p>And I see from wikipedia that he and I are roughly the same age :(<p>Engineers are often seen as a cost center for most businesses, which means you&#x27;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.....<p>&gt; My team birthed one new business unit per year each of the last two years<p>If you can directly tie yourself to a Pnl then you&#x27;ll always have more options than someone who is considered a cost center.<p>I hope that what ever he does, he takes some time of first if he needs it. I&#x27;d hate for someone like this to get burnt out.

<i>Just as electricity transformed many industries roughly 100 years ago, AI will also now change nearly every major industry</i><p>This is an underrated point, and something I don&#x27;t think most people outside of the high level Machine Learning&#x2F;AI world take seriously.<p>It&#x27;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&#x2F;oil that drives it.<p>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 &quot;electricity.&quot; If we aren&#x27;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.<p>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).<p>I&#x27;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.

I didn&#x27;t find a single reference other than this as to what he is going to do post resigning.<p>&gt;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.<p>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.

Ng&#x27;s wife&#x27;s company, Drive.ai, has made more progress in less time and with fewer resources than anybody in the autonomous driving space. So it&#x27;s probably a billion dollar company. I wonder if that has anything to do with it. There&#x27;s a lot of money in autonomous driving startups that can deliver results.

Sadly, the post has no meaningful information beyond that he&#x27;s resigning.

<p><pre><code> 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. </code></pre> Just idly, I find it interesting that practical applications of this technology seem to often funnel down to just this subset.<p>There&#x27;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.<p>I&#x27;m sure we haven&#x27;t heard the last of Andrew Ng; there are a lot of people who want those sorts of skills.

I haven&#x27;t seen any comment or quotes yet from Baidu (please correct me if I&#x27;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&#x27;s not amicable, but I do find that, and the fact he&#x27;s not sharing his next move, a little odd.<p>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&#x27;t know the people on the thread and they were vague. I just got the sense it was news to them.

Misleading title, because there is nothing about his &quot;new chapter&quot;.<p>Correct title could have been &quot;Closing the current chapter...&quot;.

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

Surprising, Andrew Ng leaves Baidu so fast.

Big blow for Baidu. Wonder if he&#x27;ll join Google again. They are the foremost in AI.

How does this compare to the SITA API? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.developer.aero&#x2F;Flight-Information-API&#x2F;API-Overview" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.developer.aero&#x2F;Flight-Information-API&#x2F;API-Overvi...</a>

I wonder if Baidu hiring Qi Lu as COO in January has anything to do with it? He has been called &quot;a leading authority in the field of artificial intelligence&quot;.<p>OTOH Ng specifically thanked Lu Qi on twitter.<p>Oh well, I guess eventually we&#x27;ll know more.

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.

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