Andrew Yan-Tak Ng (Chinese: 吳恩達 / 吴恩达, Pinyin: Wú Ēndá, Vietnamese reading: Ngô Ân Đạt) was born in London, United Kingdom, to parents of Hong Kong origin (father Ronald P. Ng and mother Tisa Ho) and has at least one brother; sources also describe his family as Singaporean or as a British immigrant family from Hong Kong.^{[1,2,14,21,23,22,35,100,15,55]} He was born on April 18, 1976 (though Ukrainian Wikipedia states April 16, 1976) and holds British and American citizenship, with Chinese heritage.^{[1,2,14,35,39,108,15,34,13,133]} Growing up, Ng spent his early years in Hong Kong and Singapore, graduating from Raffles Institution in Singapore in 1992.^[39,114] He earned bachelor's degrees in mathematics, computer science, and statistics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1997, a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1998, and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley (focusing on reinforcement learning under Michael I. Jordan) in either 2002 or 2004.^{[40,39,114,121]}

Ng began his academic career at Stanford University in 2002, serving as a professor (formerly associate professor) and currently as an adjunct professor in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering departments, as well as director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL).^[14,12,39] At Stanford, he taught students and conducted research in data mining, big data, machine learning, and robotics, where his introductory machine learning course (CS229) became the most popular course on campus with over 1,000 students enrolled in some years.^[24,12] From 2011 to 2012, Ng worked at Google, where he co-founded and led the Google Brain Deep Learning project alongside Jeff Dean, Greg Corrado, and Rajat Monga.^{[13,15,12,112,14,39,35]} He subsequently served from May 2014 to March 2017 as Vice President and Chief Scientist at Baidu in Silicon Valley, leading its Artificial Intelligence Group and expanding it into a team of several thousand people.^{[13,15,12,11,112,14,39,122,35,55]} On May 16, 2014, Ng had announced on his Coursera blog that he was stepping down from operational positions at Coursera to join Baidu.^[39] On April 11, 2024, Amazon announced Ng's appointment to its board of directors.^{[17,36,55,120]}

Ng is widely recognized for his contributions to online education, having co-founded Coursera in 2012 alongside Daphne Koller, serving as its CEO and chairman of the board.^{[17,36,14,12,39]} By 2020, three of the most popular courses on Coursera were created by Ng: Machine Learning (#1), AI for Everyone (#5), and Neural Networks and Deep Learning (#6).^[13] Through his online courses, Ng has spearheaded efforts to 'democratize deep learning', teaching either over 2.5 million or over 8 million students worldwide.^{[18,13,14,12,15]} In 2017, he established DeepLearning.AI (where he serves as CEO) to create online deep learning courses, and launched Landing AI, a company providing AI-powered Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products.^{[17,20,36,16,50,14,55,12,49,39]} In January 2018, Ng launched and currently leads the AI Fund, an initial $175 million investment fund designed to support artificial intelligence startups.^[28,123,16] Ng also serves as chairman of the board for Woebot.^[101]

Ng's research primarily spans artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, machine perception, computer vision, natural language processing, and robotics, having authored or co-authored over 100 scientific publications and frequently winning best paper awards.^{[12,16,74,96,102,14,93]} His early research included leading the Stanford Autonomous Helicopter project—which created one of the world's most advanced autonomous helicopters—and the STAIR (STanford Artificial Intelligence Robot) project, which led to the creation of the widely used Robot Operating System (ROS).^{[55,4,3,74,95,56,130]} Ng was an early advocate of using GPUs for deep learning, and in 2022, during the rise of large language models, he popularized the term 'agentic AI'.^[109,115,39] Among his academic mentees, he had Le Viet Quoc as a doctoral student. For his work, Ng received a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2007, was recognized in 2008 by MIT Technology Review as one of the 35 top innovators under 35 (TR35), and was awarded the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 2009.^[93,77,11] Regarded as one of the world's most influential computer scientists, Ng was named to Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in 2012, Fast Company's Most Creative People in 2014, and the Time100 AI list of most influential people in AI in 2023.^{[19,12,78,83,34,82,16,22,80,81,58,13]} In his personal life, Ng lives in Los Altos, California; he married in 2014, and he and his wife welcomed a daughter, Nova, in February 2019.^[94,86]

Andrew Yan-Tak Ng was born in London, United Kingdom, on April 18, 1976, to parents who were immigrants from Hong Kong.^{[37,38,39,116,18,17,40,14,15,134,135]} His father, Ronald Paul Ng, was a hematologist and lecturer at UCL Medical School, while his mother, Tisa Ho, was described as an arts administrator working at the London Film Festival or as a performing artist.^{[37,38,39,116,18,17,40,14,15]} He has one brother.^[17] Ng spent his early childhood and youth in Hong Kong and Singapore, moving to Singapore with his family in 1984, and graduated from Raffles Institution in Singapore in 1992.^{[18,25,34,94,17,40,14,15,37]}

In 1997, Ng completed his undergraduate education at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, earning a degree with a triple major in computer science, statistics, and economics, graduating top of his class.^[131,121] Between 1996 and 1998, he conducted research on reinforcement learning, model selection, and feature selection at AT&T Bell Labs.^{[40,38,85,86]} In 1998, he earned his Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.^{[39,40,131,121]} At MIT, Ng built the first publicly available, automatically indexed web search engine for research papers, which focused on machine learning and served as a precursor to CiteSeerX/ResearchIndex.^[38] Ng later earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley under the supervision of Michael I. Jordan, completing a thesis titled 'Shaping and Policy Search in Reinforcement Learning', though sources differ on whether he completed his doctorate in 2002, 2003, or 2004.^{[26,35,38,40,87,131,121]}

In 2002, Ng joined Stanford University as an assistant professor, later becoming an associate professor, adjunct professor, and director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL).^[38,40,87] At Stanford, he led research on autonomous helicopters and the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot (STAIR)—which contributed to the Robot Operating System (ROS)—and in 2008 launched the Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) program, reaching over 100,000 online students. A pioneer in online education, Ng co-founded Coursera in 2012 with Daphne Koller and later founded deeplearning.ai, leading initiatives to democratize deep learning that have taught over 2.5 million students.^{[14,15,12,28]} In industry, Ng co-founded and co-led the Google Brain project in 2011–2012, served as Vice President, Chief Scientist, and Head of AI at Baidu from 2014 to 2017—where he led autonomous driving and DuerOS initiatives—and later founded Landing AI as well as the $175 million AI Fund in early 2018.^{[16,29,49,28,26,97,124,125,11,126]} Over his career, Ng has published more than 100 scientific papers, received an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in 2007, was named one of the MIT Technology Review 35 Top Innovators in 2008, won the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 2009, was named to Time 100 in 2012 and Fast Company's Most Creative People in 2014, and joined Amazon's board of directors in April 2024.^[36,127] In 2014, Ng married Carol E. Reiley, with whom he has two children—a daughter named Nova, born in February 2019, and a son, born in 2021—and the couple was dubbed an 'AI power couple' by MIT Technology Review, though Chinese Wikipedia notes they divorced in 2024.^{[94,88,87,89,25,39,40,18,132]} He lives in California, with sources identifying his location as Los Altos Hills, Los Altos, or Palo Alto.^{[86,88,89,25,40,18]}

After completing his education, Andrew Ng began his academic career at Stanford University, where he taught and conducted research in machine learning and artificial intelligence, eventually serving as a professor and director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.^[106] In 2008, he was included in the list of the 35 most influential innovators under 35.^[77] Recognized as a pioneer of online virtual education, Ng developed Stanford University's Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platform in 2011.^[106] As a continuation of this MOOC platform, he founded Coursera in 2012 to provide global educational access to learners around the world.^[106] In 2017, he founded DeepLearning.AI, which develops online courses on deep learning.

Beside academia, Ng has played an important role in the technology industry, having been interested in deep learning since 2006 to solve key challenges in artificial intelligence. In 2010, he submitted a proposal to Google to train an artificial intelligence system inspired by the structure of the brain.^[34] He co-founded and led the Google Brain project at Google, working there from 2011 to 2012 to develop large-scale deep learning algorithms and extra-large artificial neural networks using distributed computing.^{[106,111,97,125,126,127,38,124,11]} In 2011, he collaborated with Jeff Dean and Greg Corrado to build DistBelief, a large-scale deep learning software system running on Google's cloud computing infrastructure. Google Brain was initially part of Google X, but the project's success led to its promotion as a separate Google subsidiary.^[14,107]

In May 2014, Ng joined Baidu as chief scientist of its Silicon Valley artificial intelligence laboratory, leading the "Baidu Brain" (百度大脑) project for the 1,300-person AI application development company.^{[106,34,97,125,126,127,38,124,11,122,49]} He announced his resignation from Baidu on March 20, 2017.^{[97,125,126,127,38,124,11,122,49]} In December 2017, he established the artificial intelligence company Landing.ai, serving as its Chief Executive Officer, alongside founding several other AI companies.^{[106,97,125,126,127,38,124,11]} In January 2018, he created a $175 million fund to support startups.^[28] In April 2024, Ng joined the board of directors of Amazon.^[128]

Andrew Ng joined Stanford University as an assistant professor in 2002, becoming an associate professor in 2009, and serves as a professor in the departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.^[41,40] Since joining Stanford in 2002, he has mentored dozens of master's and doctoral students, including Adam Coates, Pieter Abbeel, Ian Goodfellow (who developed Generative Adversarial Networks), Ashutosh Saxena, Honglak Lee, Ilya Sutskever, Morgan Quigley, Richard Socher, Zico Kolter, Quoc Le, and Siddhartha Batra, among many others. He served as the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), where he taught students and conducted research in data mining, big data, machine learning, and related fields.^[45,46] His machine learning course (CS229) at Stanford became the most popular course offered on campus, enrolling over 1,000 students in some years.^{[20,21,19,40]}

In 2008, Ng's research group at Stanford was among the first in the United States, and according to some sources, the world, to advocate the use of graphics processing units (GPUs) for deep learning. The rationale was that an efficient computational infrastructure could speed up statistical model training by orders of magnitude, addressing scaling issues associated with big data and enabling multi-layered neural networks to run over large datasets. At the time, it was a controversial and risky decision, but GPU usage has since become a cornerstone and global standard in the field, largely following Ng's lead.^[21] Since 2017, Ng has advocated for shifting to high-performance computing (HPC) and supercomputing to scale deep learning and accelerate progress in the field.^[21,115]

In 2012, together with Stanford computer scientist Daphne Koller, he co-founded and served as CEO of Coursera, an online university platform that offers free online courses to everyone.^[15] The platform launched successfully with over 100,000 students registering for Ng's CS229A course.^[43] Today, several million people have enrolled in Coursera courses, making the site one of the world's leading massive open online course (MOOC) platforms. As of 2020, three of the most popular courses on Coursera are taught by Ng: Machine Learning (#1), AI for Everyone (#5), and Neural Networks and Deep Learning (#6).^[42,20,21]

Andrew Ng's research focuses primarily on machine learning, deep learning, machine perception (artificial perception), computer vision, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence, and he is considered one of the most famous and influential computer scientists in the world.^[53] He frequently wins best paper awards at academic conferences and has had a major impact on the fields of AI, computer vision, and robotics.^[22,23]

During graduate school, together with David M. Blei and Michael I. Jordan, Ng co-authored an influential scientific publication introducing the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) method for his thesis on reinforcement learning for drones.^[24,105,117] His early work included the Stanford Autonomous Helicopter project, which developed one of the most capable and advanced autonomous helicopters in the world.^[54,103,3,4] Ng was also the leading scientist and principal investigator on the STAIR (Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot) project, leading a team that developed the Robot Operating System (ROS), a widely used open-source software framework for robotics.^[55,103,3,4] His vision to build an AI robot and put a robot in every home inspired Scott Hassan to back him and create Willow Garage.^[4,56] Additionally, he is a founding team member of the Stanford WordNet project, which uses machine learning to expand the Princeton WordNet database created by Christiane Fellbaum.

In 2011, Ng founded the Google Brain project at Google, which developed multi-layered, large-scale artificial neural networks using Google's distributed computing infrastructure.^[58,57,8,97] Among the project's most significant results was a neural network trained using deep learning algorithms on 16,000 CPU cores, which learned to recognize high-level concepts such as cats after watching YouTube videos and without ever having been instructed or programmed on what a 'cat' is.^[8,9,98,104] The technology developed during the project is currently used in the speech recognition system of the Android operating system.^{[59,9,60,26,99]}

Andrew Ng was involved in developing the concept of an online university, which ultimately contributed to the creation of platforms such as Coursera and Udacity. In 2008, Ng started the Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) program, which made a series of Stanford courses available online for free.^[68] Ng taught one of these courses, "Machine Learning", which contained his lecture videos alongside student materials used in the Stanford CS229 class. SEE offered an experience similar to MIT OpenCourseWare, but aimed to provide a more "complete course" experience complete with lectures, materials, problems, and solutions. The SEE videos were viewed millions of times, inspiring Ng to iterate and develop new versions of online technology. Outside Stanford, Ng and Sebastian Thrun cited Sal Khan of Khan Academy as a major inspiration, while Ng was also inspired by lynda.com and the design of Stack Overflow's forums. Within Stanford, collaborators included Daphne Koller with her blended learning experiences and co-design of a peer-grading system, John Mitchell with Courseware (a Learning Management System), Dan Boneh using machine learning to sync videos, and Bernd Girod with ClassX. Ng tested initial lesson recording designs at a local high school to establish best practices, and along with Jennifer Widom and others, strongly advocated Khan-style tablet recordings, leading to hundreds of hours of Stanford lecture videos being recorded and uploaded between 2009 and 2011.^[65]

In October 2011, the applied version of the Stanford class (CS229a) was hosted on ml-class.org and launched with over 100,000 students registered for its first edition.^[66] Featuring quizzes and graded programming assignments, it became one of the first and most successful massive open online courses (MOOCs) created by a Stanford professor.^[67,68,66] Two additional courses on databases (db-class.org) and artificial intelligence (ai-class.org) were also launched. The ml-class and db-class ran on a platform developed by students including Frank Chen, Jiquan Ngiam, Chuan-Yu Foo, and Yifan Mai. Word spread rapidly through social media and popular press, and over 40,000 Statements of Accomplishment were awarded across the 10-week courses.

This work subsequently led Ng to co-found the educational platform Coursera alongside Daphne Koller in 2012.^[11] By September 2013, Coursera had grown to reach 4.7 million users. In 2019, Ng developed a course titled "AI for Everyone", aimed at explaining artificial intelligence to a general audience in a popular manner. As of 2019, the two most popular courses on Coursera were both taught and designed by Ng: "Machine Learning" (#1) and "Neural Networks and Deep Learning" (#2).

From 2011 to 2012, Ng worked at Google, where he co-founded and directed the Google Brain Deep Learning Project alongside Jeff Dean, Greg Corrado, and Rajat Monga. In 2014, he joined Baidu as chief scientist to conduct research on big data and artificial intelligence, establishing research teams and managing development projects such as facial recognition applications and Melody, an AI healthcare chatbot.^[49] In March 2017, he resigned from Baidu.

In January 2018, Ng established an investment fund with an initial fundraising total of $175 million to encourage artificial intelligence startup companies. In 2019, Ng launched a new non-technical course titled "AI for Everyone", designed to help people understand AI's impact on society, its benefits and costs for companies, and how to navigate through the technological revolution.^[68]

Ng serves as the chair of the board for Woebot Labs, a psychological clinic that uses data science to provide medical assistance and cognitive behavioral therapy through a therapy chatbot to help treat depression, among other things.^[69] He is also a member of the board of directors for drive.ai, a company that uses artificial intelligence to develop autonomous vehicles and was acquired by Apple in 2019.^[70] Through LandingAI, Ng works extensively to democratize artificial intelligence technology and lower the barrier of entry for businesses and developers.^[16,71]

Andrew Ng is considered one of the key scientists who succeeded in bringing artificial intelligence into the consciousness of all humanity. He believes that artificial intelligence technology will improve people's lives rather than enslave the human race, maintaining that its potential benefits greatly outweigh its dangers, which he considers exaggerated.^{[39,40,129,13,119,36]} To illustrate this stance, Ng remarked that worrying about an evil AI superintelligence today is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars when humans have not even landed on the planet yet.^{[119,64,129,13,36]} This perspective aligns with that of Mark Zuckerberg, while standing in contrast to the views of Elon Musk.^[64]

Rather than being distracted by evil killer robots, Ng argues that the real threat requiring action and dialogue across academia, industry, and government is the challenge that these machines pose to labor and the future of work.^[119,64] In 2017, Ng declared his support for a basic income to support unemployed individuals, allowing broad sections of the population to acquire an education in artificial intelligence and re-enter the workforce.

In a December 2023 Financial Times interview, Ng expressed concerns regarding potential regulations on open-source AI, arguing that reporting, licensing, and liability risks could unfairly burden smaller firms and stifle innovation without markedly enhancing safety. He called for carefully designed regulations that prevent obstacles to developing and distributing beneficial AI technologies.^[61] In June 2024, Ng voiced concerns in another Financial Times interview regarding proposed California AI legislation that required developers to implement safety mechanisms such as a kill switch for advanced models, describing the bill as creating massive liabilities for science-fiction risks and stoking fear in innovators. Although other critics also warned that the bill would burden open-source developers and smaller companies, it was ultimately vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom in September 2024.^[62,63]

Andrew Ng was born in the United Kingdom in 1976 to Singaporean parents and spent his early life in Hong Kong and Singapore.^[3] He graduated from Raffles Institution in Singapore in 1992 and received his bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1997. He went on to complete a master's degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998 and earned a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley in 2002, starting work at Stanford University that same year.

Regarding his residence in California, sources differ on whether he currently lives in Los Altos Hills or Palo Alto. In 2014, Ng married Carol E. Reiley, and the pair was later recognized by the MIT Technology Review as an "AI power couple".^[85] The couple has two children—a daughter born in 2019 and a son born in 2021—and as of 2024, his wife filed for divorce.^{[44,34,87,86]}

Andrew Ng obtained a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, a Master's from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and he works as an assistant professor in the departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University as well as the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is recognized as one of the world's most important researchers in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning, having developed one of the most efficient autonomous helicopters in the world as well as the STanford Artificial Intelligence Robot project, which later evolved into ROS (Robot Operating System).^[4] He also founded the Google Brain project, which created an artificial neural network capable of self-learning to recognize cats, people, and 3,000 other objects solely by watching videos on YouTube.^[8,7,9,10] In 2008, he was named by the MIT Technology Review as one of the top 35 global innovators under the age of 35.^[6]

While Arabic and French sources state that Ng has authored around 100 or over 100 scientific publications, English and Portuguese sources report that he has authored or co-authored over 300 publications in robotics and related fields.^{[5,72,73,26,75,93,77,78,118]} His work in computer vision and deep learning has been frequently featured in press releases and reviews.^[73,74] He has corefereed hundreds of AI publications in journals like NeurIPS, served as the editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), and acted as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Conference Editorial Board (ICRA).^[33,40,84] Additionally, Ng has authored two books on artificial intelligence, including a 2018 book on AI practice that he distributed online globally to anyone interested. He publishes a weekly digital newsletter called The Batch and has written for outlets such as the Harvard Business Review, HuffPost, Slate, Apple News, and Quora Sessions' Twitter.^{[74,75,76,77,79,80,81,88,89]}

Ng has delivered invited talks and lectures at institutions including NASA, Google, Microsoft, Lockheed Martin, the Max Planck Society, Stanford, Princeton, UPenn, Cornell, MIT, UC Berkeley, and dozens of other universities.^[84] Outside of the United States, he has lectured and taught in Spain, Germany, Israel, China, Korea, and Canada.^[40]

Born in 1976, he is a living person of Chinese descent with both British and American backgrounds, having emigrated from the United Kingdom to the United States. Originally associated with London as a local writer and businessperson, he later became based in Los Altos, California.

He is an alumnus of Carnegie Mellon University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California, Berkeley. In academia, he serves as a faculty member at the Stanford University School of Engineering.

His research contributions span computer science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics. In addition to his career as a Google employee, he is active as a scientist, writer, and computer businessperson across California and England.