Andrew Ng

“We are closer than before, yet many decades away from an AI that matches human intelligence. If you stick with the original definition — aligned with what people genuinely imagine AGI to be — we remain very, very far away. [AGI defined as AI that can do any intellectual task a human can, such as learning to drive a truck through a forest or writing a PhD thesis.]”

Andrew NgResearcher

Founder of DeepLearning.AI, executive chairman of Landing AI, founding lead of Google Brain

Operationalized as no AGI (AI able to perform any intellectual task a human can) by the end of 2046, the earliest reading of 'many decades away'; in the same interview Ng metaphorically put progress at 2% over the past year with 'another 49 years to go.'

“A shuttle/bus that can only drive one bus route or just in a small region is the more promising goal: "I hope we'll have a large number of vehicles on roads within 3 years, and be mass producing them in 5."”

Andrew NgResearcher

Chief Scientist, Baidu Research; founder of Google Brain

Limited series production did begin — Baidu and King Long rolled the 100th Apolong autonomous minibus off the line in July 2018, and Navya, EasyMile and Local Motors built shuttles in small series — but by the end of 2021 there was no large number of driverless shuttles on public roads and nothing resembling mass production: deployments stayed at pilot scale with onboard attendants, US regulators suspended EasyMile passenger operations after a 2020 injury, and Local Motors shut down in January 2022.

“I think AI agentic workflows will drive massive AI progress this year — perhaps even more than the next generation of foundation models. This is an important trend, and I urge everyone who works in AI to pay attention to it.”

Andrew NgResearcher

Founder of DeepLearning.AI, founding lead of Google Brain, managing general partner of AI Fund

Agentic workflows did become the defining trend of 2024 and drove large gains (e.g., agentic coding systems lifting SWE-bench from ~14% to ~49%), but the year's biggest single capability jump came from a new generation of reasoning foundation models (o1/o3), so the comparative half of the claim did not clearly hold.

“Just as electricity transformed almost everything 100 years ago, today I actually have a hard time thinking of an industry that I don't think AI will transform in the next several years.”

Andrew NgResearcher

Chief scientist at Baidu Research, adjunct professor at Stanford, co-founder of Coursera, founding lead of Google Brain

By the end of 2022 AI had materially reshaped parts of advertising, search, finance, logistics and medical imaging, and generative AI was beginning to spread, but most major industries — construction, agriculture, hospitality, personal services — had not been transformed within the 'next several years' window Ng implied.