Taught by AI pioneers, Stanford's free online course takes you far beyond ChatGPT

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Imagine for a minute that the technology that enables Star Trek transporters is suddenly real -- it's being adopted nearly universally. Obviously, that capability would shake up everything. Within a year or so, transporter pads would be on every street corner and in every driveway. A trip from New York to LA would take five minutes and cost, maybe, $20.

Supporting the technology would open up a series of business opportunities. Training courses would crop up explaining how to install transporters, how to tell them where you want to go, how to repair them, how to incorporate them into your business strategy, and more.

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The gotcha would be that while transporter technology might extend our knowledge of fundamental physics, most people wouldn't dive into learning the foundational physics principles behind the technology. Instead, they would only want to know how to get from Pittsburgh to Peoria.

Generative AI is a lot like that. The transformative technology has had enormous acceptance, and teaching tools are everywhere. In fact, I've been running a series on free AI courses and certificates for upskilling since gen AI emerged.

But there's much more to AI than transformers, large language models, diffusion models, prompt engineering, and modern gen AI applications. Familiarity with those aspects of AI is now table stakes for AI skill building.

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In short, gen AI is only part of the much broader field of artificial intelligence.

To that end, I want to introduce you to a Stanford AI course from way back in 2011.

Hang with me here a minute because it's crucial to establish that foundational knowledge ages at a different pace than product knowledge.

Yes, 18 months ago, we didn't have agentic AI coding , and now we do. However, many of the fundamental problems AI researchers study, and the methods they use to solve them, are far more durable and well worth learning about.

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To that end, Udacity is hosting a free version of the landmark Intro to Artificial Intelligence course that Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun originally taught at Stanford in 2011.