Talking AI Disruption With the Man Who Built Google's 'Brain'

Google Home and Amazon's Echo are the most famous, but a whole raft of these gadgets is preparing to flood the market. One of the most advanced will likely come from Baidu, the Chinese tech giant that, like Google, began as a search engine and now has its tendrils in all sorts of digital and physical spaces. Andrew Ng, Baidu's chief AI scientist, calls these devices "conversational computers," and he's a key reason any of them have learned to talk in the first place. A former AI researcher at Stanford, Ng is best known for spearheading the Google Brain initiative, an ambitious artificial-intelligence project that helped advance Silicon Valley's understanding of deep-learning techniques. Instead of being programmed to respond to specific actions, a deep learning system is fed massive amounts of data from which it is able to discern patterns over time, loosely mimicking how the human mind absorbs information. Ng's system at Google famously figured out what a cat looks like after scanning millions of online images.