14 DAY TRIAL // Google has lost one important member of its team, namely Andrew Ng, an artificial intelligence expert who’s been leading the company’s “deep learning” project. The Stanford professor looks to be heading over to Baidu, China’s search giant.
Also dubbed “Google Brain,” the company’s deep learning project is actually a machine learning initiative that seeks to make computing more efficient and capable of mimicking the way the human brain works.
It’s been a controversial project and one that’s essential to Google’s search engine, as well as other products, and that’s helped the company provide one of the most useful and fine-tuned tools for scouring the Internet. In fact, it’s one of the reasons why Google Now knows what to search for when you ask for subsequent questions that include pronouns.
According to Wired, Baidu is looking to invest some $300 million in deep learning and big data research over the next few years and has invited Ng to lead the project. The transfer seems to have been in the making for a while now, since reports indicate that Ng was recruited during several meetings over the last year.
In fact, it looks like during one of his visits to Beijing in March 2013, Ng was first approached about joining Baidu by a longtime friend who actually helped found the deep learning labs of the Chinese search giant.
As he joins the Chinese search giant, Ng will run the company’s Sunnyvale laboratory, but also a research and development center based in Beijing that will focus on deep learning and “big data,” namely efforts to analyze large amounts of information.
Andrew Ng is already starting out at Baidu where he will focus his efforts for the time being. Since he is also a founder of the online education startup Coursera, Ng will need to take a step back from the company’s day-to-day operations. According to Wired, he will continue to be involved in some projects, and will remain the chairman of the board and the public face of the company, but that will be the extent of his work there.
He will also spend most of his time in Baidu’s Sunnyvale office, although he will travel to Beijing from time to time. “I’m really excited about the opportunity to build an International research organization from scratch. I’ve been super excited about AI for a long time, and this is an opportunity for me to return to that,” said Ng.