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Andrew Ng

Co-Founder & Chairman, Coursera

Search every verified Andrew Ng interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Andrew Ng, co-founder of Coursera and founder of DeepLearning.AI, has recently appeared in multiple forums discussing AI's role in development, education, and industry. At a World Bank event on the World Development Report 2026, he spoke about AI's potential for developing economies and argued that building more data centers is a key enabler for societal progress, while dismissing concerns about their water usage as misinformation. He also stated that chatbot-based learning is ineffective, asserting that while homework scores may rise, long-term learning outcomes decline when students offload cognitive work to AI. Ng has also pushed back against what he describes as fear-based messaging about AI from leading companies, which he attributes to publicity efforts and attempts to influence regulation against competitors. He called extinction fears "much more science fiction than science" and argued that slowing AI development would also slow progress on safety. He discussed liability for AI misuse by analogy to tools like hammers, suggesting users are generally responsible unless a tool is badly made. In an Agentic AI course, he acknowledged that hype around the term has grown but said the number of valuable applications using agentic workflows has also increased rapidly. He defined AGI as the ability to perform any intellectual task a human can perform and said that by that definition, AGI remains far off.

Recent appearances

Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“One of the most important things for the future, for example, is frankly to build more data centers. Data centers are a key enabler to get societies to do a lot more work done. And it turns out that data centers are incredibly efficient for the work they do. So I know there's a lot of hype about data centers, water usage, which was actually a lot of misinformation promulgated by a book that unfortunately had a major ”

“So it's really funny, you know. I wake up in the morning, put on my clothes, go to work, and I don't seem to worry about AI killing me off. A few years ago, with the rise of modern AI, generative AI, I was taken aback by the intensity of the lobbying efforts from a handful of businesses that had often spent hundreds of millions or billions of dollars training up AI models that wanted to stifle what they call open-sou”

“People cite different timelines for achieving AGI because they use different definitions of AGI. The definition that makes the most sense to me is the ability to perform any intellectual task that a human can perform. For example, a human brain might need five years to learn and write a doctoral dissertation. But could an AI write a doctoral dissertation, or can a human learn to drive a truck through a dense rainfore”

“There is truly a lot of misinformation surrounding AI. And I think the root of many of these problems is that 2-3 years ago, an active PR campaign began, along with attempts by labs to influence legislation. One of the most valuable things in AI is massive language models, on which companies have spent billions of dollars to train. And if you have invested billions in training a model, it is, of course, not in your i”

“I think that, so I think that if I do something on my computer and my computer does something bad, there's a question of liability, who should be responsible. Maybe so, again, make an analogy to an everyday thing. If I use a hammer and, you know, damage someone else's property, probably I am liable as a user of the tool unless the hammer is solely badly made that when I use the hammer, the head flies off and hit some”

“About three years ago, as AI was taking off, I was really surprised by the intensity of the hype or the stoking fears about AI for publicity purposes to get people to pay attention or to convince lobbyists to pass regulations to shut off competitors. Over the last few years, a lot of those arguments that AI could lead to human extinction fortunately lost credibility when, you know, people went to congress to testify ”

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