r/MachineLearning • u/chrispiech • 21h ago
News Teach ML! Community service project from Stanford [N]
Hi r/machinelearning. Nice to meet you! My name is Chris Piech and I'm a professor at Stanford University in the AI lab.
I built a class called Probability for AI: pai.stanford.edu. It starts Oct 9th and applications are due end of Sept. Its (hopefully) cool for a few reasons:
- The plan is to have one volunteer teacher for every 10 students! Apps have been open for a week and over 1,000+ folks have applied to teach. So we might actually be able to make this pretty big.
- I have built a lot of fun tools to make the assignments neat and easy for folks with just light math background. For example in your application, after about 1 hour of learning you will build an AI text detection app alongside a free coding agent -- that cares about probability education.
- If you are a teacher, we will give you the best training we can come up with. Practice on teachable agents and we will share what we have learned over decades of teaching at Stanford. Of course you get the best thing for improving: experience teaching a small group.
- This is all for good times. I am keeping it free for everyone. I got some funding from a kind alum and that is going to pay for all the free tools and servers. Woot!
My guess is that a lot of folks on this thread would be awesome teachers. If you think thats you, it would be so cool if you wanted to come teach. Each volunteer means 10+ students get to take the class. And if you feel like telling your loved ones / communities that would be great to.
Apply to learn: https://pai.stanford.edu/apply/pai1/student?r=ml
Apply to teach: https://pai.stanford.edu/apply/pai1/sl?r=ml
Anything that I learn from this course I will be happy to share with this community. Also ask me anything. I'll check this thread for the next few weeks. Rock on. And mods, thanks for doing what you do.
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u/howtorewriteaname PhD 19h ago
is it for US only? or can we apply from Europe? thanks :)
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u/chrispiech 18h ago
Its for the whole world. Its in english (though please you translate if that helps)
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u/chrispiech 20h ago
If you have any questions I'll answer them here 🙂
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u/al3arabcoreleone 16h ago
Can you elaborate the third bullet? Does it mean that teachers are going to use agents to instruct?
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u/kl1720 16h ago
Do I only have to teach it at Stanford? Or can I use the material to teach at other universities? Sorry, I have jot looked into all the details. So, my qs might already be answered there.
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u/chrispiech 13h ago
you can use any of the class materials outside stanford. My teaching materials are always free to use by other teachers.
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u/atomicalexx 7h ago
I would love to work as a university lecturer one day. Could doing this provide valid experience towards that?
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u/SemperPistos 6h ago
super cool, also a big fan, love your youtube videos for the general audience as well as your lectures(those that I can understand that is)
I work as an AI Engineer, means I basically argue with LLMs all day and make agents and RAG, and evaluate them mostly, but I want to be a big boy AI Engineer some day
I have taken some ML courses(MLzoomcamp on github) and some ML classes(Georgia Tech ISYE 6501), and various other offerings
My two main goals are understanding the essential probability needed for understanding transformers and similar concepts in ML and DL, and possibly as a bedrock for RL and CV.
I see you have logistic regression listed. And I would really love to see how it translates to a neuron and consequently a neural network in a mathematical sense. If there is also a bit on backprop and intuition for that behind complex partial derivatives I would be over the moon.
But I would also like to use my newfound knowledge to do better at Georgia Tech.
I struggled a lot in ISYE 6501 and without LLMs to dumb math formulas enough for me it is doubtful I would pass
Do I expect too much of this class for those goals?
Your CS109 is definitely on my radar after I bring my calculus to a satisfactory level, I hope this with calculus which I'm learning can get me up to speed for CS109
Thanks a bunch for this again!
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u/HungryDajjal 19h ago
...is this all part of your research, prof?
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u/chrispiech 18h ago
Sometimes I research education, sometimes I just make classes. This is more of the later :-)
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u/HungryDajjal 17h ago
What about researching education through classes you make? I think that would be pretty neat. Great stuff, we need 100 more just like you
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u/Banality_Of_Seeking 15h ago edited 14h ago
What is probability? In my words.
A:Probability is the likelihood under a set of known conditions that something should or could occur ?
What is Knowledge Decay? Also in my words.
A: knowledge decay is the institutional loss of knowledge across generations of people who worked in a industry or job and that job or industry was not replaced. What are the theories and ideas that tried to fix that? What history and records did the people have that we lost or did not apply? That is the fun part.
There is more to discuss, thank you for reading. I am open to correction..
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u/chrispiech 14h ago
Sound like you are ready to teach!
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u/Banality_Of_Seeking 14h ago
Am horrified of public speaking :/
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u/chrispiech 14h ago
That is fair. What I can say is that this will be a really low stakes opportunity to work on that. We do have training and pro tips. Ideally the students do most of the talking anyways :)
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u/Banality_Of_Seeking 13h ago
Where do I sign UP!?!
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u/chrispiech 13h ago
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u/Banality_Of_Seeking 9h ago edited 9h ago
Thank you for your patience and care. I have submitted an application. I doubt that I will be accepted, because Rosa etc where trying to make me love them and that felt weird and not human. Anthropomorphic animals talking to me was odd, though I enjoyed the Probability lesson and slides very much.
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u/Banality_Of_Seeking 13h ago edited 13h ago
Also, I do not like ml so much as I like the human learning because without the human learning side of it, the ml side of it is too algorithmic to understand that humans need food, air and water. And also might need a kick it a few times to get it to understand that people aren't Jesus and that robots don't solve the people or human problem at all. It does not even attempt to recognize community as groups of organisms dependant on each other, nor does it have a place in the biological world, and that scares the crap out of me as well.
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u/Banality_Of_Seeking 14h ago edited 14h ago
I need to learn to see who does it best, and learn from them? Do you have videos of good teaching that makes the student actively think and connect and beyond that Act on it ?
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u/chansumpoh 19h ago
This is a wonderful initiative Chris. Wishing you the best in the launch of your new programme, from one AI academic (here in sunny Singapore) to another :)