In a Wall Street Journal interview conducted by Gillian Wong, Andrew Ng, formerly of Google and now the head of AI research for Baidu, tries to cool down the hype of two hot tech sectors, driverless cars and deep learning. An excerpt:

WSJ:

What about the self-driving car project? We know Baidu has partnered with BMW on that.

Andrew Ng:

That’s another research exploration. Building self-driving cars is really hard. I think making it achieve high levels of safety is challenging. It’s a relatively early project. Building something that is safe enough to drive hundreds of thousands of miles, including roads that you haven’t seen before, roads that you don’t have a map of, roads where someone might have started to do construction just 10 minutes ago, that is hard. …

WSJ:

Who’s at the forefront of deep learning?

Andrew Ng:

There are a lot of deep-learning startups. Unfortunately, deep learning is so hot today that there are startups that call themselves deep learning using a somewhat generous interpretation. It’s creating tons of value for users and for companies, but there’s also a lot of hype. We tend to say deep learning is loosely a simulation of the brain. That sound bite is so easy for all of us to use that it sometimes causes people to over-extrapolate to what deep learning is. The reality is it’s really very different than the brain. We barely (even) know what the human brain does.•