Ng is an icon of the artificial intelligence world with the pedigree to match, and he is not yet 40 years old. In 2011, he founded Google Brain, a deep-learning research project supercharged by Google’s vast stores of computing power and data. Delightfully, one of its most important achievements came when computers analyzing scores of YouTube screenshots were able to recognize a cat. (The New York Times’ headline: “How Many Computers to Identify a Cat? 16,000.”) As Ng explained, “The remarkable thing was that [the system] had discovered the concept of a cat itself. No one had ever told it what a cat is. That was a milestone in machine learning.”

Source: Inside The Mind That Built Google Brain: On Life, Creativity, And Failure