A New Course Is Live: Learn Artificial Intelligence with the Great Andrew Ng

A New Course Is Live: Learn Artificial Intelligence with the Great Andrew Ng

Yesterday, after months of preparation and planning, Andrew Ng’s latest artificial intelligence course—AI for Everyone—officially launched on Coursera. I finished the first week overnight and found it incredibly rewarding, so I couldn’t resist recommending it. After all, being able to learn from someone like Andrew, a true legend in the industry, really does feel like “reading ten years’ worth of books.”

His previous Coursera course on deep learning was also outstanding, but it was primarily aimed at professional programmers or people hoping to work in deep learning practice. It included mathematics, computer science principles, and practical material, so it wasn’t really suitable as an introductory course for the general public—even though it still attracted hundreds of thousands of enrollments on Coursera. In AI for Everyone, however, Andrew addresses ordinary learners without specialized backgrounds, using a simple and accessible style to explain the principles, domains, directions, and practical steps for helping traditional organizations transform toward AI.

Andrew Ng’s legendary status in AI began with his leadership of the Google Brain project. Google Brain once used a deep learning network made up of thousands of computers to learn autonomously from the internet and successfully recognize images of cats without human guidance, laying the foundation for Google’s overwhelming strength in AI. At the same time, Andrew made even more fundamental contributions to modern AI, especially deep learning. For decades, the development of AI had been constrained mainly by the processing speed of CPUs. Andrew, together with graphics chip maker NVIDIA, leveraged the floating-point computing power of GPUs and, through the CUDA project (led on NVIDIA’s side by Ian Buck), brought GPUs into deep learning at scale. This fundamentally accelerated the rapid growth of the entire industry.

During the period when both Andrew Ng and Qi Lu joined Baidu, the company confidently proclaimed its “All in AI” strategy, determined to fully commit itself to artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, the results fell short of the ambition. In the end, Baidu was unable to escape its entrenched corporate DNA. After the honeymoon period, both Andrew and Qi Lu left one after another, and Baidu drifted back toward its old path of making money through paid search rankings. During Andrew’s years at Baidu, his influence in both the industry and academia declined somewhat, making the move feel hardly worth it.

Beyond these legendary experiences, Andrew Ng is also the former head of Stanford’s AI Lab and a co-founder of Coursera, one of the world’s three major MOOC platforms. His previous course, Deep Learning, is also one of Coursera’s flagship offerings. After leaving Baidu, many in the industry speculated that he would join his wife’s autonomous driving venture—she is also an expert in AI—but in fact Andrew went on to found three separate deep-learning-focused platforms in education, consulting, and investment, all of which he has been developing simultaneously.

Seen from this angle, AI for Everyone is not only a course for popularizing AI knowledge, but also, in another sense, part of Andrew’s effort to expand his AI consulting business. It can be seen as a more detailed extension of the AI transformation playbook he released several months earlier, offering corporate managers guidance on how to transform their organizations for the AI era, while also potentially helping his consulting team attract large enterprise clients. (Of course, none of this is explicitly stated in the course itself—this is just my own impression.)

At present, the course costs less than 200 RMB on Coursera (around 199 RMB), which is practically free compared with training programs that often cost tens of thousands. In fact, if you don’t need Coursera’s verified certificate, you can take the course for free. The only drawback is that because it has only just launched, there is not yet a Chinese subtitle version. Still, translation communities are already buzzing with activity, so I believe Chinese subtitles will be available soon.

If you have taken Andrew Ng’s previous deep learning course, you probably remember his teaching style well. There are no flashy visuals or elaborate packaging. Andrew simply sits quietly in front of a computer in the corner of an office, talking about every aspect of artificial intelligence. In front of him are a computer and a tablet, which he uses to write and explain concepts as he lectures. The camera switches back and forth plainly between him and the slides. The course relies entirely on substance, not on packaging or effects, to engage the audience.

In AI for Everyone, Andrew still maintains this simple style. The only visible change is that the previously bare white wall now has a robot and some electronic components as decoration, and the lighting seems a bit more polished than before. But overall, the course still depends on his calm, thoughtful, and engaging way of explaining things.

Among the many metaphors used to describe artificial intelligence, Andrew compares AI to electricity. He believes that the revolutionary changes AI will ultimately bring to humanity will be as significant as the changes electricity brought during the last industrial revolution—perhaps even greater. The age of AI has already arrived quietly. So why not start now, and learn about it with the great Andrew Ng?

The only real regret is that because Coursera’s servers are located overseas, access from within China is often unstable, which affects the learning experience. For this reason, I adopted a “download first, study later” approach: after downloading the audio and materials from the course (Coursera, as a globally renowned MOOC platform, is very user-friendly in this regard), I then study them offline, which makes the experience much smoother. Consider that a small practical tip. If you still can’t access the course normally, you can contact the author for a shared copy.