AI pioneer Andrew Ng joins Amazon’s board of directors

Ng is currently the managing director at the Palo Alto, California-based AI Fund, which he founded in 2017 to invest in budding entrepreneurs building AI startups.

FILE PHOTO: Amazon will be adding AI stalwart and Google Brain co-founder Andrew Ng to its board of directors. | Photo Credit: AP

Amazon will be adding AI stalwart and Google Brain co-founder Andrew Ng to its board of directors, the e-commerce giant announced on Thursday. The company also said that Ng will be replacing a seat that has been vacated by Judy McGrath, a former CEO of MTV, who will not be running for re-election.

Ng is currently the managing director at the Palo Alto, California-based AI Fund, which he founded in 2017 to invest in budding entrepreneurs building AI startups. He has headed AI teams at Google, where he co-founded the Deep Learning project along with Chief AI Scientist of the company, Jeff Dean. 

Deep learning is a branch of artificial intelligence that has helped majorly push image classification and language translation tasks, among others. Under his guidance, the team trained a computer system to recognise cats in YouTube videos without being taught what a cat was.

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Ng then joined Baidu in 2014 as its Chief Scientist. He currently serves as the chair and co-founder of an open online AI course provider called Coursera and regularly appears in their videos. Additionally, he is an adjunct professor at Stanford University.

Ng’s appointment is a sign that Amazon is looking for better thought leadership when it comes to artificial intelligence strategy.

“His academic and private sector work developing machine learning and deep learning algorithms and supporting companies developing and adopting AI applications will help to inform the Board’s perspective on the opportunities and challenges that AI presents and its transformative social and business potential,” a statement released by the company on Thursday noted.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy discussed how technology could be the next big pillar for the company after its retail and cloud computing businesses, in a shareholder letter released on Thursday. 

Jassy said that generative AI is possibly the biggest technological transformation since cloud computing and perhaps “since the internet”.

The company recently made its largest outside investment in its three-decade history to gain further ground in the AI race with a $4 billion funding in OpenAI-rival, Anthropic.