‘Life is shockingly short’

Why AI visionary Andrew Ng teaches humans to teach computers

Andrew Ng has led teams at Google and Baidu that have gone on to create self-learning computer programs used by hundreds of millions of people, including email spam filters and touch-screen keyboards that make typing easier by predicting what you might want to say next.

As a way to get machines to learn without supervision, he has trained them to recognize cats in YouTube videos without being told what cats were. And he revolutionized this field, known as artificial intelligence, by adopting graphics chips meant for video games.

To push the boundaries of artificial intelligence further, one of the world’s most renowned researchers in the field says many more humans need to get involved. So his focus now is on teaching the next generation of AI specialists to teach the machines.

Nearly two million people around the globe have taken Ng’s online course on machine learning. In his videos, the lanky Briton of Hong Kong and Singaporean upbringing speaks with a difficult-to-place accent. He often tries to get students comfortable with mind-boggling concepts by acknowledging up front, in essence, that “hey, this stuff is tough.’’

Ng sees AI as a way to “free humanity from repetitive mental drudgery.’’ He has said he sees AI changing virtually every industry, and any task that takes less than a second of thought will eventually be done by machines. He once said famously that the only job that might not be changed is his hairdresser’s — to which a friend of his responded that in fact, she could get a robot to do his hair.

At the end of a 90-minute interview in his sparse office in Palo Alto, California, he reveals what’s partially behind his ambition.

“Life is shockingly short,’’ the 41-year-old computer scientist says, swiveling his laptop into view. He’s calculated in a Chrome browser window how many days we have from birth to death: a little more than 27,000. “I don’t want to waste that many days.’’

BUILDING BRAINS

AS A TEEN

An upstart programmer by age six, Ng learned coding early from his father, a medical doctor who tried to program a computer to diagnose patients using data. “At his urging,’’ Ng says, he fiddled with these concepts on his home computer. At age 16, he wrote a program to calculate trigonometric functions like sine and cosine using a “neural network’’ — the core computing engine of artificial intelligence modeled on the human brain.

“It seemed really amazing that you could write a few lines of code and have it learn to do interesting things,’’ he said.

After graduating high school from Singapore’s Raffles Institution, Ng made the rounds of Carnegie Mellon, MIT and Berkeley before taking up residence as a professor at Stanford University.

THE MARK OF NG

Ng’s standout AI work involved finding a new way to supercharge neural networks using chips most often found in video-game machines.

Until then, computer scientists had mostly relied on general-purpose processors — like the Intel chips that still run many PCs.