Deep learning is a new chapter for every sector: Andrew Ng, Coursera | Economic Times

Photo: Andrew Ng

Andrew Ng, one of the world's foremost researchers on artificial intelligence computing technology, dreams about living in an AI-powered world. The co-founder of online education platform Coursera has made it his mission to build talent for AI through his new project, deeplearning.ai.

Photo: deeplearning.ai

Andrew is preparing courses on deep-learning--advanced AI inspired by the human brain's neural networks--that will be available on Coursera. In an interview with ET's J Vignesh, the former chief scientist at Baidu also spoke about how technology disruption can help countries like India leapfrog and take a lead in the new world. Edited excerpts:

How are we progressing towards the concept of singularity, or general intelligence, from sector-specific artificial intelligence? Where are we presently? 
That is hard to project. There are two concepts--one is artificial general intelligence and the other is specialised intelligence. We are seeing tremendous progress in specialised intelligence. AI has been making tremendous progress in machine translation, self-driving cars, etc. Basically, all the progress I see is in specialised intelligence. It might be hundreds or thousands of years, or if is there is an unexpected breakthrough, decades, (before we see any progress towards general AI).

What is your view of the Indian AI ecosystem?
I have a sense of what a few companies in India are working on. I have seen very interesting pitches from entrepreneurs.In terms of building consumer products, the US and China are ahead of India. The interesting opportunity for India is whenever there is a disruption in technology, it gives every country a chance to leapfrog and take a lead. To take an example, China is leaping ahead in growing the China electric vehicle ecosystem.

Can AI play a role in developing society? 
AI will play a big role. Before we even get to AI, there's a lot of ground work we could also do. What happens in a lot of industries is first comes the IT revolution and then the AI revolution. What I mean by IT revolution is a lot of things that were previously done in the analogue and physical world are now digitised. So, education through Coursera, Khan Academy and others is undergoing an IT revolution. The IT revolution creates data to enable AI revolution.  In education, there is still a lot of work to be done to further the IT revolution. The AI revolution is starting now.
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Source: Economic Times