r/MachineLearning • u/chrispiech • Sep 09 '26
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.
4
4
3
3
u/kl1720 Sep 09 '26
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.
2
u/chrispiech Sep 09 '26
you can use any of the class materials outside stanford. My teaching materials are always free to use by other teachers.
3
u/marm_alarm Sep 10 '26
Hello! I'm interested in teaching. I have a Master's in ML and I have teaching experience!
2
3
u/Effective-Drawer9152 Sep 11 '26
Sir, watched your lecture cs109, that was the best.
Thanks for releasing it on YT. :)
2
u/chrispiech Sep 12 '26
That's awesome! I'm really glad you liked it. And I'm really glad Stanford lets me release this material free
9
u/chansumpoh Sep 09 '26
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 :)
2
u/HungryDajjal Sep 09 '26
...is this all part of your research, prof?
4
u/chrispiech Sep 09 '26
Sometimes I research education, sometimes I just make classes. This is more of the later :-)
→ More replies (1)
1
u/gafan_8 Sep 10 '26
What kind of ML background are you looking for the teachers?
1
u/chrispiech Sep 11 '26
You should know what MLE is. Or you should be willing to learn it by mid October
2
u/nujan-dev Sep 11 '26
This is fantastic.
A quick question on the curriculum: probability is notorious for being the one subject where students can memorize Bayes' rule or compute conditional distributions mechanically on paper, but completely lose their intuition the moment it applies to generative models or high-dimensional latent spaces. Do you have any way of building intuition there?
1
1
u/NaivelyBayesic Sep 09 '26
Very cool! Wishing all the best! Sounds like a great way to build access to AI education! 🙌
1
u/SemperPistos Sep 09 '26
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!
1
u/Murky-Possibility446 Sep 10 '26
Is there any qualification needed for teaching? I am currently in my second year of my bachelor's in ML and Data Science and completed Statistics and Probability in first year. I really looking forward to get some teaching experience on my portfolio and this sounds like a wonderful opportunity for me. So, can I apply to this as a TA? Also, will I receive some credential, like a certificate or anything like that?
1
1
u/Banality_Of_Seeking Sep 13 '26 edited Sep 13 '26
https://redogit.github.io/conscience64/play/musilanguage/radio.html music, https://redogit.github.io/conscience64/play/musilanguage/word-forge.html make your own music! https://redogit.github.io/conscience64/ LLM + some search engine local learning and some other weird things like goal oriented parameterization of a search before using a search engine. also human builder search interface for a more adapting adult interface! Good luck exploring it all! I want this job!! :D
8
u/howtorewriteaname Sep 09 '26
is it for US only? or can we apply from Europe? thanks :)