Just over a decade ago, Andrew Ng was part of a Google Brain project that showed the power of deep learning technology.
For three days, Ng’s team fed a neural network millions of unlabelled images from YouTube videos. After training, the system could identify features such as cats in images it had not encountered before — even though it had not been explicitly taught how. This research became known informally as the “Cat Paper” and laid the groundwork for future advances in artificial intelligence.
At around the same time, from his perch as a Stanford professor, Ng pushed into online teaching, making a course on machine learning available to anyone with an internet connection. Its popularity, along with that of other “massive open online courses”, or Moocs, at the time, led Ng and his colleague Daphne Koller to found online education provider Coursera.