Why I Joined Landing AI

AI is at the heart of some of the world's most exciting products, from smart speakers to self-driving cars. Yet most companies don't know how to take advantage of the opportunity. It's not rocket science, but it takes the right combination of talent and strategy. 

My first exposure to a large-scale AI project was at Baidu in 2014, when I joined the DeepSpeech team to help develop personal assistants and smart speaker technology that now touches billions of users. Like most of the team, I avoided collecting and labeling data. Instead, like a good software engineer, I focused on code, systems, and learning algorithms. Fortunately, we had a few data experts, and in hindsight, it’s clear the project would never have gotten off the ground without the dataset that they created. That experience taught me that AI is very different from typical software engineering.

Working with amazing AI researchers and product groups at great companies like Baidu, I realized that AI is mature enough to enable new kinds of products. Computers have gained the ability to see and hear much like people, an ability that seemed far away just a short time ago.  

However, AI also depends on large, high-quality datasets. This creates a chicken-or-egg problem for many new companies. On one hand, to make an accurate AI, they need a big dataset drawn from a large community of users. On the other, to appeal to a large number of users, they need a very accurate AI.

The straightforward solution is to develop AI teams inside of companies with scalable products. This recipe has worked well for internet companies like Google, Baidu, and Facebook.

AI plus a scalable product create a powerful combination. These ingredients made possible internet search, product recommendation, and personal assistants. The combination allows products to learn and improve faster. A better product appeals to a bigger market, which generates more data. After seeing many examples, I realized that the combination of AI and scalable products can create large, defensible businesses.  

The hard part is bringing both great product people and great AI people together in a single company. It's not hard to find product people who can think in terms of scale. That's a core discipline taught in hundreds of engineering and design schools worldwide. But AI is a different animal. It's new and evolving quickly. Few schools have a firm handle on it. That results in a scarcity of AI talent. Big internet companies fight to capture it. New tech companies or those in other industries settle for the leftovers. 

Many companies that realize the importance of AI try to get around the scarcity of talent by converting software-engineering groups into AI groups. I’ve seen many of these groups apply software-engineering best practices to AI projects. Sadly, they discover the hard way that there are key differences. Even when a team finds a real opportunity, the path to shipping it is often misaligned with company strategies designed to ensure top-notch software engineering.

After spending years in AI research, I am eager to use the technology to build new products that empower consumers and enterprises. In the current environment, there is an opportunity for AI experts to focus on growing the field as a whole rather than working one at a time. Many companies have gained traction on mobile or internet platforms without using AI and are searching for ways to grow faster. Many are missing a strong AI group and a strategy for how to apply AI to their core business. As a member of the Landing AI team, I can help them all and make a much bigger impact on the industrialization of AI.

Landing AI makes an all star AI team available to the entire industry, along with a recipe for replicating it. Landing AI’s mission is to empower companies to jumpstart AI and realize practical value. Led by Andrew Ng, our team includes key members of Google Brain, Baidu’s Silicon Valley AI Lab, and Amazon Go. We can’t bring the AI revolution to the broader industry all by ourselves, so we need to train the next generation of AI experts.  

I strongly believe in AI’s potential as a new engineering discipline that has the potential to transform all major industries, just like electrical engineering and software engineering.  

If you want to partner with our team at Landing AI, we are open to working with you, and I would be excited to explore using cutting-edge AI technology to make your products even better and to level up the AI capability inside your organization.