Wow, that was unexpected. I admire Ray Kurzweil but Andrew has always struck me as that rare sort of person who can both see the big picture and pick out the stepping stones to getting there. That is incredibly valuable and I did not expect that Google would let him be poached by a rival search company.
Ray Kurzweil is a laughingstock in the machine learning community and he hasn't been a legitimate researcher for many years. Putting him in the same sentence as Andrew Ng is a bit insulting.
I think Andrew had already severed his official ties with Google when he started Coursera, since he was probably the person to recommend Google hire Geoff Hinton to replace him (see [1]). If Andrew had returned to Google, I don't think he would have as great of a leadership role as the one that Baidu is offering to him, since there are several other AI leaders that are just as prominent, if not more so, at Google (like Hinton and Kurzweil).
