Definitely appears to be on a good trajectory, but the tech was definitely not developed from scratch.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.01716.pdf

Tesla was considered a kook in his days - he definitely wasn't mainstream.

You kidding? He was well known in all the celebrity circles, lived it up in the middle of Manhattan and had Gatsby-like parties.

Andrew Ng is mainstream? People know his name?

I don't mean to put down Andrew's achievements, but once you have a dense enough (high-impact) network, these things appear to happen on their own.

Also note: Andrew's wife is the founder of Drive.ai (and the other two founders are his students).

The smartest thing Andrew has done is to hire a PR agent right after he did the ml-class MOOC, and never breathed a day without consulting him/her ever since.

Do you have a source for this? Searching doesn't yield any results.