Slim, quiet, and wearing a pair of thick glasses, Quoc Le does not strike you as someone who is leading a revolution in the AI field.

In 2011, Le co-founded Google Brain, together with his Ph.D. advisor Andrew Ng, Google Fellow Jeff Dean and Google Researcher Greg Corrado. The goal was exploring deep learning in the context of Google’s gigantic data. Before that, Le has done some pioneering work at Stanford on unsupervised deep learning.