Andrew Ng

If you have ever learned anything about artificial intelligence online, chances are Andrew Ng had something to do with it. This British-American computer scientist, born in 1976 and raised between Hong Kong and Singapore, decided early on that AI should not stay locked inside a few elite labs. His life's mission has been simple and huge at once: to put it in the hands of anyone willing to learn.

In 2011 he founded and led Google Brain, the team that brought deep learning into the heart of Google. But his biggest move came in 2012, when he co-founded Coursera with Daphne Koller and posted his Machine Learning course. Millions of people around the world took that course, people with no PhD and no access to an expensive university, and it became one of the most popular classes in internet history.

He then served as Chief Scientist at Baidu (2014 to 2017), and later founded DeepLearning.AI, Landing AI and the AI Fund, always with the same idea. He is a professor at Stanford and became known for a line that sums him up: "AI is the new electricity," something that will transform every industry, not just tech.

To me, Andrew Ng's lesson is the one that hits closest to home: knowledge is worth nothing if you keep it to yourself. He opened the door so that people like me, without being an engineer, could build with AI. Every time you ask Claude to explain something hard in simple words, you are living exactly what he dreamed: AI as a patient teacher for everyone.