The two things I'm most excited about are self-driving cars and speech. Speech doesn't sound like that much, but it's one of those technologies with the potential to change everything. Steve Jobs didn't invent the touch screen. He just made it work very well, and that's changed everything.
I just thought making machines intelligent was the coolest thing you could do. I had a summer internship in AI in high school, writing neural networks at National University of Singapore - early versions of deep learning algorithms. I thought it was amazing you could write software that would learn by itself and make predictions.
Even companies like Baidu and Google, which have amazing AI teams, cannot do all the work needed to get us to an AI-powered society. I thought the best way to get us there would be creating courses to welcome more people to deep learning.
I believe that the ability to innovate and to be creative are teachable processes. There are ways by which people can systematically innovate or systematically become creative.
Text input is certainly useful, but images and speech are a much more natural way for humans to express their queries. Infants learn to see and speak well before they learn to type. The same is true of human evolution - we've had spoken language for a long time compared to written language, which is a relatively recent development.
I am looking into quite a few ideas in parallel and exploring new AI businesses that I can build. One thing that excites me is finding ways to support the global AI community so that people everywhere can access the knowledge and tools that they need to make AI transformations.
A lot of the game of AI today is finding the appropriate business context to fit it in. I love technology. It opens up lots of opportunities. But in the end, technology needs to be contextualized and fit into a business use case.
Imagine if we can just talk to our computers and have it understand, 'Please schedule a meeting with Bob for next week.' Or if each child could have a personalized tutor. Or if self-driving cars could save all of us hours of driving.
AI is witnessing an early innings in India. It has a thoughtful government, and India can race ahead if it chooses to.
AI is creating tremendous economic value today.
The Chinese market is very different. One of the things that I believe is that the biggest, hottest tech trend in China right now is O2O, or online-to-offline.
Some of the most successful businesses succeed by exploiting their users.
I will continue my work to shepherd in this important societal change... In addition to working on AI myself, I will also explore new ways to support all of you in the global AI community so that we can all work together to bring this AI-powered society to fruition.
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.
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.
The success, or failure, of a CEO to implement AI throughout the organization will depend on them hiring a leader to build an organization to do this. In some companies, CIOs or chief data officers are playing this role.
The big AI dreams of making machines that could someday evolve to do intelligent things like humans could - I was turned off by that. I didn't really think that was feasible when I first joined Stanford.
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.
The biggest ethical challenge AI is facing is jobs. You have to reskill your workforce not just to create a wealthier society but a fairer one. A lot of call centre jobs will go away, and a radiologist's job will be transformed.
If you have a lot of data and you want to create value from that data, one of the things you might consider is building up an AI team.
