I took both, the AI and the ML class, and completed them to the end. All this with a very demanding work schedule at a startup in the valley. I've also been a P

I took both, the AI and the ML class, and completed them to the end. All this with a very demanding work schedule at a startup in the valley. I've also been a PM for a large scale ML product that is in production and used by millions of people. I say all this because the courses were perfectly geared to someone like me. I thought the courses were excellent and pragmatic. (of course, like anything, there can be improvements). I think the issue here is what we are witnessing, aside from the awesomeness of open courseware, is the evolution and continued maturity of Computer Science as a discipline, as it takes more and more mathematical concepts into its fold. Machine Learning is growing up as a foundational pattern / algorithm that has evolved from research to applied to basic-building-blocks-everyone-should-know. Yes, it took the Valley and Stanford to liberate it (as a poster indicates somewhere here), but that's ok. There is as much street cred in understanding how to implement/design practical applications using ML as there is in pushing the frontier on new ML mathematical techniques. That's how new commercial innovation takes place. You need both sides of the equation; the research and the practical. The course chose a balance that favored the latter, because prior to this little existed. You can hear it in Prof. Andrew Ng's videos... "this is big in the valley"..."you now know how to implement XYZ"... "if you ask these questions on an ML product, you can save your tea, time and money" (I'm paraphrasing). Recall that at one point, logic/truth tables, sorting algorithms, graphs, etc. all needed to be derived mathematically with their proofs. But then they became axioms and codified as foundational building blocks of CS that just work, enabling us to focus on the next step in the evolution. We don't question or even think twice today when implementing "if (X && Y)".