As the founding lead of the Google Brain team, former director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and now overall lead of Baidu's AI team of some 1,200 people, I've been privileged to nurture many of the world's leading AI groups and have built many AI products that are used by hundreds of millions of people.
I see a minimum living wage as a long-term solution, but I'm not sure that's my favorite. I think society benefits if all the human race is empowered and aspiring to do great things. Giving people the skill sets to do great things will take work.
When we automated away the elevator operator function, who knew that all the descendants of those operators would become social media marketers, machine learning engineers, and all these other jobs that we didn't even have a language to describe back then.
The way AI complements people's work, it actually creates a lot of new jobs, a lot of demand. For example, if a automatic visual inspection technology helps spot flaws in manufacturing parts, I think that in some cases, this does create a lot more demand for people to come in to rework or to fix some of the parts that an AI has found to be flawed.
Baidu Research has three labs - two in Beijing that are already largely built up, and the Silicon Valley one is being built from scratch. We're hiring pretty rapidly, about one person a week, but we are about a month in, so honestly, we haven't done that much work yet.
Silicon Valley and Beijing are the leading hubs of AI, followed by the U.K. and Canada. I am seeing a lot of excitement in India, going by the number of people who are taking Coursera courses on AI.
I think that AI will lead to a low cost and better quality life for millions of people. Like electricity, it's a possibility to build a wonderful society. Also, right now, I don't see a clear path for AI to surpass human-level intelligence.
I think the first wave of deep learning progress was mainly big companies with a ton of data training very large neural networks, right? So if you want to build a speech recognition system, train it on 100,000 hours of data.
One of my relatives had been asking me on how he could break into AI. For him to learn AI - deep-learning, technically - a lot of facts exist on the Internet, but it is difficult for someone to go and read the right combination of research papers and find blog posts and YouTube videos and figure out themselves on how to learn deep-learning.
We can build a much brighter future where humans are relieved of menial work using AI capabilities.
A single neuron in the brain is an incredibly complex machine that even today we don't understand. A single 'neuron' in a neural network is an incredibly simple mathematical function that captures a minuscule fraction of the complexity of a biological neuron.
We think that many companies view Coursera as a quality, convenient, inexpensive way to continue employee development. Is there a contract with a company that might make sense? I don't have an answer to that yet.
Our education system has succeeded so far in teaching generations to do different routine tasks. So when tractors displaced farming labor, we taught the next generation to work in factories. But what we've never really been good at is teaching a huge number of people to do non-routine creative work.
We're doing a lot of work on self-driving cars. We do not currently have cars in the U.S., but we plan to, for development and testing. I think we are within striking distance of making self-driving cars a reality, and these would be powered by deep learning.
Job displacement is so huge, I'm tempted to not talk about anything other than that.
I am super optimistic about the near-term prospects of AI because every time there is a technological disruption, it gives us the opportunity of making the world a little different.
In terms of building consumer products, the U.S. and China are ahead of India. The interesting opportunity for India is whenever there is a disruption in technology, it gives every country a chance to leapfrog and take a lead. To take an example, China is leaping ahead in growing the China electric vehicle ecosystem.
Most of the value of deep learning today is in narrow domains where you can get a lot of data. Here's one example of something it cannot do: have a meaningful conversation.
I think the next massive wave of value creation will be when you can get a manufacturing company or agriculture devices company or a health care company to develop dozens of AI solutions to help their businesses.
I think the Indian AI ecosystem is growing rapidly. A lot of Indian entrepreneurs reach out to me seeking feedback about startups and products. And some of them have very interesting business ideas.
