Intelligent fault-diagnosis methods using machine learning techniques like support vector machines and artificial neural networks have been widely used to distinguish bearings’ health condition. However, though these methods generally work well, they still have two potential drawbacks when facing massive fault data: (1) the feature extraction process needs prior domain knowledge, and therefore lacks a universal extraction method for various diagnosis issues, and (2) much training time is generally needed by the traditional intelligent diagnosis methods and by the newly presented deep learning methods. In this research, inspired by the feature extraction capability of auto-encoders and the high training speed of extreme learning machines (ELMs), an auto-encoder-ELM-based diagnosis method is proposed for diagnosing faults in bearings to overcome the aforementioned deficiencies. This paper performs a comparative analysis of the proposed method and some state-of-the-art methods, and the experimental results on the rolling element bearings data set show the effectiveness of the proposed method not only with adaptive mining of the discriminative fault characteristic but also at high diagnosis speed.