Meet Dr. Andrew Ng, co-founder of Coursera

Dr. Andrew Ng is a pioneer in machine learning and online education. A Stanford University adjunct professor and founding member of the Google Brain team, Dr. Ng is always looking for the best ways to accelerate responsible AI practices. We had a chance to ask Dr. Ng about how he got started with artificial intelligence, the early days of Coursera, and the importance of learning new things.

Andrew Ng: I started learning to code at around age 6, and have been fascinated with using computers to help people since then. As a high school student in Singapore, I once had an internship as an office assistant where I just remember doing a lot of photocopying. Even as a teenager, I thought that if only I could build something to automate all the photocopying I had to do, I might be able to pursue more meaningful tasks. Artificial intelligence is automation on steroids, and to this day, a lot of my work on AI is on automating different tasks.

I was also fortunate to learn about AI from my father, who is a medical doctor. He was doing research on using basic AI algorithms to diagnose diseases, so I learned about neural networks and expert systems from him and started implementing neural networks as a teenager

When I was teaching machine learning at Stanford, I found myself delivering the exact same lecture year after year, in the same room – even telling the same jokes. Long before Coursera, I started a few projects at Stanford to explore videotaping my courses (and those from other professors) to post online.

In 2011, the online version of my machine learning course “suddenly” went viral and had over 100,000 enrollments. There was actually nothing sudden about this success. Over the years, I had built five earlier online education sites to experiment with formats, and see what worked best. To outsiders, however, it seemed like an overnight success. Shortly after, I started Coursera with my co-founder, Daphne Koller, to bring this technology to more learners and educators.

Building startups is hard! It requires a very diverse set of skills that are almost impossible for any single person to fully master. When I was younger, I believed that if only I worked and studied harder, I could figure almost anything out. I’ve since realized that I need help from others. The best entrepreneurs know that they need to keep learning, but also know when and where to get the help that they need.

I was born in the UK, grew up in Hong Kong and Singapore, and came to the U.S. after high school. I feel fortunate to have been exposed to different cultures. Having been a student in different education systems also allowed me to appreciate the diversity of ways of teaching, and try to pick and combine the best parts of each.

When I moved from Hong Kong to Singapore, I was behind everyone else in school, because everyone else spoke fluent English and I did not. To this day, I am grateful to the teachers who slowly and patiently spoke with me to make sure I understood, and helped me to catch up. When I moved from Singapore to the US, I again had to adapt to a new culture. These experiences have helped me appreciate the richness of different cultures, and I hope to build tools for people of all cultures and backgrounds.

On a more somber note, with incidents of violence against Asians on the rise since the start of the pandemic, I have also seen firsthand many Asian friends fearful for their personal safety. Supporting the #StopAsianHate movement is just a tiny step in what still remains to be done to help all people — Asians and others — find a comfortable place in American society. As entrepreneurs, we build products that can affect millions, and each of us must also lead by example. I hope that through our voices and our work, entrepreneurs can be a force to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion throughout the world.

Keep learning! My father has been a great inspiration for me for lifelong learning. He has completed over 150 online courses in the past ten years, while continuing to work as a doctor. His studies have spanned topics from creative writing to complexity theory. For him, learning is not a task or a responsibility—it’s a joy. “The joy of learning helps keep the mind sharp and allows us to appreciate the beauty of the subject matter,” he says. “We need to remain mentally young and have the same sense of wonderment we had as children.” I hope his story inspires you to keep learning as well.