Note that Ng did not say he was comparing to Google. A third-party made that claim:
> “He ordered 1,000 GPUs [graphics processing units] and got
> them within 24 hours,” Adam Gibson, co-founder of
> deep-learning startup Skymind, told VentureBeat.
> “At Google, it would have taken him weeks or months to get that.”
According to Wikipedia [1], Ng built a 16,000-CPU-core system at Google. (It's unclear what the CPU<->GPU conversion factor is)
Google was once heavily invested in just saying no to GPUs across the board. They even had a convenient FAQ from their platform team filled with all sorts of out of date FUD demonstrating why GPUs at Google were simply never going to happen.
The hiring of Geoffrey Hinton changed all that with Deep Neural Networks which are easily 50x more efficient on GPUs. And in the meantime, Baidu demonstrated what one could achieve by integrating them top to bottom in their search engine while Google happily stuck its technological fingers in its ears singing la-la-la-la.
Given that Andrew Ng's lab's other achievement was to demonstrate that 3 quad GTX 680 workstations were equivalent to that 16,000 CPU core system at Google, Baidu seems like a really great place for him to go.
> “He ordered 1,000 GPUs [graphics processing units] and got > them within 24 hours,” Adam Gibson, co-founder of > deep-learning startup Skymind, told VentureBeat. > “At Google, it would have taken him weeks or months to get that.”
According to Wikipedia [1], Ng built a 16,000-CPU-core system at Google. (It's unclear what the CPU<->GPU conversion factor is)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Ng