Renowned artificial intelligence expert Andrew Ng hopes to raise up to $150 million to fund more work in AI, according to documents filed this week with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission. The documents were first spotted by online private capital community site PE Hub.
Given his track record, Ng should have no trouble finding funding for this white-hot tech area, which aims to make computers smarter. Ng is the former chief scientist at Chinese tech giant Baidu (BIDU) and he helped build the Google Brain project with Jeff Dean. He also co-founded online education firm Coursera and is a professor at Stanford University, as noted by news site TechCrunch.
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Work in AI—and its subsets of machine learning and deep learning— have already helped software “learn” to recognize images, understand the spoken or written word, and empower self-driving cars. The hope is that these technologies will lead to more breakthroughs in medicine, healthcare, manufacturing, and other fields.
Virtually every tech company of any size—including Google (GOOG), IBM (IBM), Microsoft, Facebook (FB), and Salesforce (CRM)—are pouring resources into AI research and hiring experts as fast as they can.