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Stanford A.I. Courses

ai.stanford.edu

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Re: Stanford A.I. Courses

#21

Post by barbazoo »

tonmoy wrote: post #12
ripvanwinkle wrote: post #9

Looking for guidance here. There are a lot of courses out there on AI from esteemed institutions at that. What do people recommend as a curriculum for someone with a formal univ education in CS albeit from a while ago and who has programmed extensively though not in Python. The goal at the end is to have a deep understanding of the LLM space and its adjacencies.

Although I myself am not related to the industry or academia pertaining to AI, I have heard many people speak highly of the zero to hero course by Andrej Karpathy: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAqhIrjkxbuWI23v9cThsA9Gv... I myself loved it and learned a lot, but YMMV

Thanks for sharing.

Re: Stanford A.I. Courses

#22

Post by BigElephant »

If I search the intro to robotics course online, I see there is a playlist from Stanford but the videos are 14 years old. Does anyone know if there are more recent videos? Or are there other courses that are good for robotics?

Re: Stanford A.I. Courses

#23

Post by imranq »

I would not start with any course unless you had a project in mind that would take the knowledge from the course to get started. Otherwise you risk wasting a lot of time for knowledge that won't help you in any way and will get outdated in a few months anyway

Re: Stanford A.I. Courses

#24

Post by JimmyRuska »

redeux wrote: post #2

Can I take these courses online for free or is this an ad for Stanford?

You might be better off looking at MIT OCW search, and selecting video lectures, looking at standford youtube, checking out the 2019 videos https://ai.stanford.edu/stanford-ai-courses/

Most of these look like they're just the slides and syllabus, correct me if I'm wrong.

Re: Stanford A.I. Courses

#27

Post by lolinder »

itissid wrote: post #14

I think the way courses are taught can give you some needed grounding, like you should always take a good linear regression class. But I think that is as far as it gets you, a theoretical base. Honestly the issue is that most ML programs are taught as being some kind of additive skill set: the more courses you take the better or selection of the right kind of courses gets you some where. In reality: 1. most real worl…

> most real world problems are also about subtraction knowing what not to try and why it might not work

This is true in most fields. I view school as giving you a broad overview of everything that you might need in your field, but for any given problem it will be on you to narrow it down to the solutions you actually need and then to learn that specific set of solutions well enough to apply it.

People fresh out of college will usually try to apply everything all at once until they learn—either from a mentor or their own hard experience—to filter it down. It might be that ML has it worse than other fields right now not because it's taught wrong but because it's new enough that there aren't enough mentors with decades of war stories.

Re: Stanford A.I. Courses

#28

Post by AJRF »

I've moved from "traditional" software engineering to a role of working with ML (building + deploying models used in product features) and of the team I work with - and my extended communication with developers at other companies making the same transition - every single person has said the Francis Chollet book (Deep Learning with Python) is all they really needed.

It walks a very thin line between too little info and *just* enough to get you to the point where you know what you don't know (the productive point) and it explains the Math in code samples. It really is a very good way of teaching. When I was reading, I thought the theory covered was too far from the Mathematical base, but I found my self being surprised at how I could hold my own in discussions that moved in to theory.

That said, this likely won't be enough for you to be a researcher - but I imagine for a lot of people tempted by courses like the OP - that isn't the actual end goal anyway.

Re: Stanford A.I. Courses

#30

Post by lolinder »

imranq wrote: post #23

I would not start with any course unless you had a project in mind that would take the knowledge from the course to get started. Otherwise you risk wasting a lot of time for knowledge that won't help you in any way and will get outdated in a few months anyway

I took a deep learning course in late 2019, during which we implemented transformers as described in Attention is All You Need and fine-tuned GPT-2. The output was amusing, but useless, but I still remember the basic principles.

Now, a few years later, transformers are the tech, and GPT-2's successors are the most hyped technologies of the century so far.

All of which is to say that I wouldn't assume that coursework without immediate application is useless. I'm in a much better position to jump in on the latest AI stuff than I would be if I hadn't taken that course.

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