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By: myai4.com | March 2026
WHO IS ANDREW NG?
If we had to name the person who has done the most to put artificial intelligence in the hands of millions of ordinary people, that name would be Andrew Ng. Scientist, professor, entrepreneur and visionary, Ng is known in the technology world as one of the "fathers of deep learning" and the great democratizer of AI education.
Andrew Yan-Tak Ng was born in London in 1976, the son of Hong Kong immigrants. In 1984 his family moved to Singapore, where he attended secondary school at Raffles Institution, one of Asia's most demanding schools. His intellectual curiosity brought him to the United States, where he earned his bachelor's degree with a triple major in Computer Science, Statistics and Economics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1997. He later obtained his master's degree from MIT and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
A CAREER BUILT ON MAJOR MILESTONES
Andrew Ng's career is marked by a series of achievements that have transformed the global technology industry:
STANFORD AND MASS EDUCATION
Ng is an adjunct professor in Stanford's Computer Science Department, where his CS229 machine learning course became one of the most popular on campus, with over 1,000 students per year. In 2011 he led the development of Stanford's MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) platform and offered a Machine Learning course online that reached more than 100,000 students. That success led him to co-found Coursera.
GOOGLE BRAIN
In 2011 he founded and led the Google Brain team, the large-scale deep learning research project that helped transform Google into the AI company it is today. Under his leadership, Google Brain developed algorithms that dramatically improved image and voice recognition across Google's products. Ng was also one of the first to propose, in 2008, the use of GPUs to accelerate AI model training — a practice that is now standard across the entire industry.
BAIDU
From 2014 to 2017 he served as Vice President and Chief Scientist at Baidu, China's largest technology company, where he led a team of 1,300 AI professionals and was responsible for the company's global artificial intelligence strategy. There he developed platforms like DuerOS and helped position Baidu at the forefront of AI development worldwide.
COURSERA: EDUCATION FOR EVERYONE
Ng co-founded Coursera in 2012 with the vision of making quality education accessible to anyone in the world, free of charge or at low cost. Today Coursera is the world's largest online learning platform, with millions of users across every continent. In total, more than 8 million people have taken an AI course taught directly by him.
DEEPLEARNING.AI AND THE AI FUND
After leaving Baidu in 2017, he founded DeepLearning.AI, a technology education company that has trained millions of professionals in AI worldwide. He also launched the AI Fund, an investment fund initially seeded with 175 million dollars to support artificial intelligence startups.
In April 2024, Amazon announced Ng's appointment to its board of directors, cementing his influence at the highest levels of global technology.
HIS PHILOSOPHY: "AI IS THE NEW ELECTRICITY"
Andrew Ng is famous for a phrase that has been repeated at conferences and in media around the world: "AI is the new electricity." With this analogy, Ng explains that just as electricity transformed every industry a century ago (from manufacturing to medicine), artificial intelligence is destined to transform every sector of the modern economy.
For Ng, the key is not fear of AI, but education and adaptation. "Never stop learning" is another of his constant mantras. In his 2025 annual review, Ng declared that the year might be remembered as "the dawn of the agentic AI era" — a period in which technology moved from experimental to operational at massive scale.
HIS VISION FOR 2026 AND BEYOND
Andrew Ng is optimistic about the future, but not naive. He acknowledges that AI will bring significant disruptions to the job market, but firmly believes the solution lies in continuous education and building new skills. His personal mission has remained the same since the beginning: to ensure that anyone in the world, regardless of background or financial resources, can access quality education in artificial intelligence.
In 2025 a year Ng described as a historic turning point, global investment in AI infrastructure exceeded 300 billion dollars, with companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Meta committing trillions for the years ahead. Ng sees this not as a threat, but as an unprecedented opportunity for those who are prepared.
HIS PRESENCE AT AI4 2026
Andrew Ng will join the landmark keynote panel at AI4 2026 alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Fei-Fei Li, on Tuesday, August 4th at The Venetian Las Vegas. For thousands of professionals and entrepreneurs who have learned AI through his online courses, seeing him on this historic stage is like seeing their teacher at the height of his influence.
If there is anyone who embodies the idea that artificial intelligence is not just for scientists or large corporations, but for everyone, that person is Andrew Ng.
Note: Article produced with AI assistance (Claude by Anthropic), based on verified sources including Wikipedia, andrewng.org, Coursera, Stanford HAI, Fortune, and ai4.io. Data should be verified before publishing.