A lot of AI successes have been about automating the routine things that do not call on the highest levels of human creativity," he says, noting that spam filtering and recognizing faces in photographs can now be done deftly by software.
After teaching at Stanford for several years (he's now on leave), Mr. Ng felt that grading was eating up too much of teaching time. Computers, he thought, could step in and grade complex assignments, not just multiple-choice exams.
"I actually enjoy working through problems with students," Mr. Ng says. "What I don't enjoy is grading 400 homeworks. And so our thinking was to automate some of the grading so it frees up more faculty time for the interactions."