10-202: Introduction to Modern AI (CMU)
modernaicourse.org
modernaicourse.org
“ Students are permitted to use AI assistants for all homework and programming assignments (especially as a reference for understanding any topics that seem confusing), but we strongly encourage you to complete your final submitted version of your assignment without AI. You cannot use any such assistants, or any external materials, during in-class evaluations (both the homework quizzes and the midterms and final).
The rationale behind this policy is a simple one: AI can be extremely helpful as a learning tool (and to be clear, as an actual implementation tool), but over-reliance on these systems can currently be a detriment to learning in many cases. You absolutely need to learn how to code and do other tasks using AI tools, but turning in AI-generated solutions for the relatively short assignments we give you can (at least in our current experience) ultimately lead to substantially less understanding of the material. The choice is yours on assignments, but we believe that you will ultimately perform much better on the in-class quizzes and exams if you do work through your final submitted homework solutions yourself.”
This is what a student, who truly wants to learn rather than simply complete a course / certification, would do... Use AI tools to explain + learn, but not outsource the learning process itself to the tools.
What’s your hypothesis of how AI can accelerate how your brain understands something?
In my case, learning enough trig and linear algebra to be useful in game engine programming / rendering has been made a lot easier / more efficient.
The same way Google or Wikipedia enables learning.
What are your beliefs / hypothesis of how having a human teacher can help you understand something?
AI explanations are no longer terrible garbage. The LLM might not be doing original research, but it has definitely read the textbook. :/ And 1000 related works.
You shouldn't believe the LLM when it tells you how to micro-optimize your code, but you can take suggestions as a starting point and verify them.
Theyre alot more than "suggestion engines". They can reason with you, show you examples, tell you how to dig deeper and verify what theyre saying, etc.
One precondition is the human teacher can challenge you independently of your own self-control/will.
Does one still need to read, take notes, write, act, etc? Yes. The feeling of newfound knowledge that comes from reading/watching a virtuoso demonstration is always a mirage--I suspect most of us have the memory of watching someone do algebra on the board and then having the feeling of understanding melt away later when faced with the page. That's not changing, so far as I can tell.
But we should acknowledge that allowing students to ask questions at will, even ill-posed questions, might have some value.
I'm somewhat biased because I was involved in a previous, related course. The important takeaways aren't really about gritty debugging of (possibly) large homework assignments, but the high-level overview you get in the process. AI assistance means you could cover more content and build larger, more realistic systems.
An issue in the first iteration of Deep Learning Systems was that every homework built on the previous one, and errors could accumulate in subtle ways that we didn't anticipate. I spent a lot of time bisecting code to find these errors in office hours. It would have been just as educational to diagnose those errors with an LLM. Then students could spend more time implementing cool stuff in CUDA instead of hunting down a subtle bug in their 2d conv backwards pass under time pressure... But I think the breadth and depth of the course was phenomenal, and if courses can go further with AI assistance then it's great.
This new class looks really cool, and Zico is a great teacher.
I loved those courses, great memories.
https://openai.com/index/zico-kolter-joins-openais-board-of-...
Having said that, it's probably a good course, CMU courses are often great.
I was just expecting way more sota models in many fields due to the title.
If someone has this kind of ressource I would be extremely interested!
It's sometimes easy to just listen and understand, but be unable to write the code myself - having this coding homework task has really helped me solidify this new knowledge.
10/10 would recommend
But tbh, it'll more likely be repairing those burger flippin' robots
In your estimation : How much time does one realistically need every week to successfully finish the course?
Huh?
What do they mean by AI then?
These are important topics with important industrial applications which have the only downsides to not be suitable for implementing friendly chatbots and for raising the stocks of Silicon Valley companies.
As someone who studied in a university system where the courses you had to take were mostly set in stone (just starting to offer some electives now), I really fancy the option of being able to choose what you study as much as possible.
The AI course I took was mostly symbolic methods and some classic ML at the end. Most students were not interested at all and would've probably been more engaged studying ML directly. Too bad that wasn't an option.
AI is much broader than LLMs alone. Computer vision, RL, classical ML, recommender systems, speech recognition, ... are still part of AI, just not very visible to the average consumer.
According to what? Spent money? Number of users? Outcomes and if so which ones?