AI Guru Andrew Ng Looks Beyond Silicon Valley to the Masses

"I'd rather we spend more time addressing these very real issues than the sort of fantasies, or scenarios leading to evil killer robots," Mr. Ng said in a recent interview. Mr. Ng is the former chief scientist of Baidu Inc., where he started a 1,300-person division that helped create the Chinese tech conglomerate's AI-powered search engine, virtual assistant and other products. Before that, he co-founded Google Brain, Alphabet Inc.'s deep-learning research team. His work on neural networks helped lead to the creation of an AI system capable of identifying images, such as cats, by watching videos. In April 2017, he left Baidu to launch the Palo Alto, Calif.-based online education platform called deeplearning.ai.