10-202: Introduction to Modern AI (CMU)

by vismit2000 • 5 months ago

259 60 5 months ago

emil-lp• 5 months ago

[flagged]

axseem• 5 months ago

It really depends on the target audience, because a lot of people have no idea what they are using is called an LLM or that there are various types of generative AI.

gignico• 5 months ago

I think the problem is the under representation of other branches of AI research: knowledge representation, automated reasoning, planning, etc.

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.

small_model• 5 months ago

Well it's the dominant and most successful implemented AI, would a comp sci course teach every failed computer architecture or focus on the ones that are in wide use today.

suddenlybananas• 5 months ago

I think comp sci courses focuse on fundamentals rather than what's popular. Besides, other kinds of AI are not "failures", they have plenty of uses.

gield• 5 months ago

Your analogy to computer architectures doesn't make sense, unless comparing GPT-like LLMs to different LLM architectures like Mamba or RWKV. It indeed wouldn't make sense to not teach about Mamba or RWKV in an introductory AI or LLM course.

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.

utopiah• 5 months ago

most successful implemented AI

According to what? Spent money? Number of users? Outcomes and if so which ones?

smokel• 5 months ago

Don't trip over words. The course offers quite a range of knowledge that is suitable outside LLMs. It's an introduction.

cubefox2• 5 months ago

This is a perfectly reasonable take. It's quite outrageous that this was flagged.

sim04ful• 5 months ago

Nothing on symbolic reasoning ?

cultofmetatron• 5 months ago

I believe that would be part of whats now "classical ai"

cubefox2• 5 months ago

It's called GOFAI, or not AI at all. It's basically all machine learning nowadays.

xdavidliu• 5 months ago

that would be the exact opposite of modern

chvid• 5 months ago

No. That will be covered by the Post-modern AI course in the fall semester.

leonvoss• 5 months ago

That's not AI.

DonaldFisk2• 5 months ago

Why not? It was called AI at the time.

aanet3• 5 months ago

AI Policy for the AI Course

“ 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.”

linhns• 5 months ago

This is the way it should be. AI to speed up the understanding process, and one final evaluation without any help to cement the understanding.

topherhunt• 5 months ago

I don't think the final evaluation is to "cement the understanding" so much as _verify_ that students have taken accountability for their own learning process.

_345• 5 months ago

I disagree. I think we should treat AI tools like calculators for the exam.

andsoitis• 5 months ago

AI to speed up the understanding process

What’s your hypothesis of how AI can accelerate how your brain understands something?

piker2• 5 months ago

My money is on extraordinarily poor final exam results and/or cheating.

khannn2• 5 months ago

In my day professors said that you'd never have an AI in your pocket

eeixlk• 5 months ago

There are no correct answers, you just have to predict what one could be while micro-dosing.

ashertrockman• 5 months ago

It feels downstream of CMU's "reasonable person principle". They know that people are going to use AI on their homework, but they trust that they want to learn and improve their skills -- and this is good advice for doing so.

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.

jasonfarnon3• 5 months ago

I'm old but cumulative assignments are nothing new (the build an OS class, build a compiler class, etc) and my recollection is after you submitted an assignment the instructor would release a correct version you could swap in for yours. So any bugs in previous modules (that the TA/grader didn't catch) couldn't hold up the current assignment.

jcgrillo• 5 months ago

Way back when I was a student I had a professor who had a policy that if your homework scores differed substantially from your exam scores, the homework portion of your grade would be disregarded and your final grade would be determined solely by the midterm and the final. It was a harsh policy, and at the time I hated it, but in retrospect it was fair. Seems even more relevant today.

gabrieledarrigo• 5 months ago

Do you think this is a good course? Or, what do you suggest as a structured course to learn how LLMs work?

aboardRat42• 5 months ago

Nice to finally see the revival of Lisp and Prolog.

signa11• 5 months ago

prolog in another skin is called erlang you know.

hearsathought• 5 months ago

Lisp and Prolog never really "vived" nor were they ever really gone/dead. So they can't be revived. They've always been there, in the background, in their niche. As they always will.

DonaldFisk2• 5 months ago

Sadly, not part of this course, though Lisp and Prolog are very useful for other things. C's fine for building neural networks from scratch, and you can glue different subsystems together to make anything more complex than that using Python.

aboardRat42• 5 months ago

Sadly, not part of this course,

Huh?

What do they mean by AI then?

mold_aid2• 5 months ago

Can't wait for postmodern AI.

blackoil• 5 months ago

How to flip burgers better than an AI robot!

aanet3• 5 months ago

:) Too true

But tbh, it'll more likely be repairing those burger flippin' robots

mold_aid2• 5 months ago

"This is the most used AI chatbot in the world!" "Who uses it?" "Other AI chatbots!"

frankdenbow• 5 months ago

thanks for sharing, these look great.

teleforce• 5 months ago

I hope the instructor will publish a textbook to support and accompany the course, will buy in a heartbeat.

apavlo• 5 months ago

For those that are unaware, the instructor of this is on the board of OpenAI:

https://openai.com/index/zico-kolter-joins-openais-board-of-...

somethingsome• 5 months ago

I'm a little annoyed that 'modern AI' refers here only on LLMs, modern AI is way bigger than that.

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!

neriymus• 5 months ago

I started doing the free version of the course a few days ago - the lessons are excellent but what is even better are the homework tasks which allows me to run my tests locally!

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

jasonfarnon3• 5 months ago

Can you share what hardware resources are expected for the assignments? Are the students just doing this on their personal computers or are they given cluster access?

melasadra• 5 months ago

To those who actually are actually attempting to complete the course ie doing all the assignments in addition to watching lectures:

In your estimation : How much time does one realistically need every week to successfully finish the course?

10-202: Introduction to Modern AI (CMU)

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