An AI pioneer says the technology is 'limited' and won't replace humans anytime soon

NEW YORK - When Andrew Ng talks about AI, people listen - in classrooms, boardrooms and Silicon Valley. The researcher - turned-educator - turned-investor has become an AI statesman of sorts, co-founding Google Brain, which became part of Google’s flagship DeepMind division that now produces some of the world’s best AI systems, and serving as Chief Scientist of Chinese tech titan Baidu. In today’s influencer-obsessed information landscape, Ng’s biggest claim to fame might be his credential as a “Top Voice” on LinkedIn, an honor the platform gives to a select few handpicked experts, with over 2.3 million followers. Armed with decades of AI experience, Ng says he remains clear-eyed about AI’s abilities. “The tricky thing about AI is that it is amazing and it is also highly limited,” Ng told NBC News in an interview on the sidelines of his AI Developers Conference in November. “And understanding that balance of how amazing and how limited it is, that’s difficult.” Over the past few years, generative AI has attracted hundreds of billions of dollars in investment as nearly every major tech company has pivoted towards the industry’s hottest topic. But in the last several months, many have questioned whether the surging investment has created a bubble now at risk of bursting due to persistent issues like hallucinations , AI’s involvement in mental health crises and increased regulatory scrutiny . Ng is broadly bullish about AI’s upward trajectory, though he is quick to cast doubt on AI systems’ potential to broadly displace humans in the near future. He has repeatedly argued that artificial general intelligence (AGI), roughly defined as AI systems that can match human performance on all meaningful tasks, is a distant possibility - contrary to other AI luminaries who envision AGI emerging in the next few years . “I look at how complex the training recipes are and how manual AI training and development is today, and there’s no way this is going to take us all the way to AGI just by itself,” Ng said. “When someone uses AI and the system knows some language, it took much more work to prepare the data, to train the AI, to learn that one set of things than is widely appreciated,” he added. Ng also has stellar bona fides in the education world. Besides serving as a computer science professor at Stanford University, Ng founded Coursera - one of the world’s largest online learning platforms - and oversees one of the most popular AI-focused education platforms, DeepLearning.AI . With over a decade of success in the AI-meets-education ecosystem, Ng adopts a Chef Gusteau approach to AI education and coding in particular, arguing that anybody and everybody should code given advancements in coding tools. “Some senior business leaders were recently advising others to not learn to code on the grounds that AI will automate coding,” Ng said. “We’ll look back on that as some of the worst career advice ever given. Because as coding becomes easier, as it has for decades, as...

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