Andrew Ng

Andrew Ng (born 1976 in London) is a British-American computer scientist and one of the most influential figures in modern machine learning. A Stanford professor, he co-founded the Google Brain project that put deep learning at the center of the industry, served as chief scientist at Baidu, co-founded Coursera — where his machine-learning course became one of the most-taken classes on earth — and went on to found DeepLearning.AI, Landing AI, and the AI Fund. Few people have taught more humans how AI actually works.

The new electricity

Ng coined the era’s most durable metaphor in 2016–2017: AI as the new electricity, a general-purpose technology that would transform every industry the way electrification did a century earlier. The framing — opportunity, not apocalypse — has anchored his public voice ever since, through books, newsletters, and short courses aimed at getting practical AI skills into as many hands as possible.

He is equally known for what he refuses to fear. Ng has repeatedly said he cannot see any plausible path by which AI leads to human extinction — telling the U.S. Senate’s AI Insight Forum in 2023 that he just doesn’t get the argument — and calls doom scenarios a myth promulgated in tech, warning that hype about existential risk fuels burdensome licensing rules that entrench big incumbents and crush open source. That stance put him publicly at odds with his own former students and collaborators, including Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, and made him a leading opponent of California’s SB-1047. He concedes AI has real harms — bias, misuse, job disruption — but insists regulation should target applications, not math.