Artificial Intelligence is the New Electricity. Dr. Andrew Ng. Stanford University AI, Founder of Coursera, Baidu Research

Feb 16, 2017. Park Presidio, San Francisco. Professor Andrew Ng of Stanford University, founder of Coursera and currently the head of Baidu research leading a team of 1300 engineers is spearheading innovation and applications of Artificial Intelligence was at Gigahom AI Conference Yesterday. Dr. Ng has taught a well know class on Machine Learning that practically launched Coursera. Dr Ng also was the founder of the Google Brain Project which developed a very large scale and distributed Neural Network.

There is no industry we CAN’T transform using AI

100 years ago when electricity came about, people debated whether AC or DC current would be the way to go. In fact using electricity was so complicated that companies had to hire a VP of Electricity to manage it. People didn’t understand it and many were afraid of the harm it can cause. Now we don’t think about electricity in the same way anymore we think about how fast our cell phone charge would run out and where one could get it recharged quickly so I can stay connected to the digital cloud. Machine Learning & AI is quickly getting the attention of corporations, venture capitalist, researchers and startups. However there is a shortage of people who understand both the technical side of AI and the business side of applying that technology to different aspects of a business: Sales, Marketing, Forecasting, Finance, HR, Contracts, Transactions, Payments, Support etc. There is a global shortage of AI people. Taking “Moonshots” such as “Curing Humanity of All Disease” is not an aspiration but Dr. Ng maintains that there is a much more practical approach to AI.