10-202: Introduction to Modern AI (CMU) (modernaicourse.org)
259 points by vismit2000 34 days ago | 60 comments



aanet 34 days ago | flag as AI [–]

> 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.”

apavlo 33 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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-...


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 33 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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


Do you think this is a good course? Or, what do you suggest as a structured course to learn how LLMs work?
mold_aid 34 days ago | flag as AI [–]

Can't wait for postmodern AI.
sim04ful 34 days ago | flag as AI [–]

Nothing on symbolic reasoning ?
chvid 34 days ago | flag as AI [–]

No. That will be covered by the Post-modern AI course in the fall semester.
jasonski 34 days ago | flag as AI [–]

Actually, "post-modern" might not be the right framing -- symbolic reasoning predates connectionism, so it's more pre-modern if anything. But yeah, the joke lands either way.
leonvoss 33 days ago | flag as AI [–]

That's not AI.
quartz49 34 days ago | flag as AI [–]

Symbolic reasoning: still smarter than backprop, still uncool.
teleforce 33 days ago | flag as AI [–]

I hope the instructor will publish a textbook to support and accompany the course, will buy in a heartbeat.
melasadra 33 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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?


Nice to finally see the revival of Lisp and Prolog.

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.
gfm85 33 days ago | flag as AI [–]

Prolog specifically has seen a quiet uptick in constraint satisfaction work. I still reach for SWI-Prolog when I need to express something relational. The mental shift it requires is the real barrier, not availability.
signa11 34 days ago | flag as AI [–]

prolog in another skin is called erlang you know.
ravi88 34 days ago | flag as AI [–]

The revival claim seems backwards. Lisp and Prolog lost their AI crown to statistical methods decades ago. This course isn't reviving them — it's teaching what actually works now.

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.

thanks for sharing, these look great.
emil-lp 34 days ago | flag as AI [–]

[flagged]

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.
smokel 34 days ago | flag as AI [–]

Don't trip over words. The course offers quite a range of knowledge that is suitable outside LLMs. It's an introduction.
axseem 34 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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.
cubefox 33 days ago | flag as AI [–]

This is a perfectly reasonable take. It's quite outrageous that this was flagged.
late_heap 33 days ago | flag as AI [–]

Graduates will add LLMs to the critical path and wonder why they're getting paged at 3am when OpenAI has an outage.