Making Friends with AI

The best AI course you’ve ever watched

The ultimate course to educate AI beginners and amuse AI experts is finally available for free!

Cassie Kozyrkov

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Today, Making Friends with Machine Learning is finally available in full and for free on YouTube! You can now enjoy Google’s legendary AI course designed to amuse technical and non-technical folks alike* by following these links:

While the first 3 parts focused on giving you the concepts and roadmaps to lead a successful applied machine learning project, Part 4 indulges your curiosity about what’s going on under the hood. The final chapter covers the intuition behind:

  • Clustering and k-Means
  • Lazy learning and k-NN
  • Perceptron
  • Maximal Margin Classifier
  • Support Vector Classifier
  • Support Vector Machines
  • Decision Trees
  • Boosted Aggregation
  • Random Forests
  • Ensemble Models
  • Naive Bayes
  • Linear Regression
  • Logistic Regression
  • Neural Networks / Deep Learning

You’ll gain insights into a whole bunch of algorithms… all without having to study the equations. To be fair, those equations are what’s already in all the textbooks, so the goal of this course was to give you something you can’t get elsewhere. It’s all about intuition and conceptual understanding. Luckily, after you’ve absorbed the intuition, those equations will make much more sense if/when you do choose to study them.

Introducing the course

Making Friends with Machine Learning was an internal-only Google course specially created to inspire beginners and amuse experts.* Today, it is available to everyone!

The course is designed to give you the tools you need for effective participation in machine learning for solving business problems and for being a good citizen in an increasingly AI-fueled world. MFML is perfect for all humans; it focuses on conceptual understanding (rather than the mathematical and programming details) and guides you through the ideas that form the basis of successful approaches to machine learning. It has something for everyone!

After completing this course, you will:

  • gain an intuitive and correct understanding of core machine learning concepts.
  • understand the flavor of several popular machine learning methods.
  • avoid common errors in machine learning.
  • know how machine learning can help your endeavors.
  • gain insight into the steps involved in leading machine learning projects from conception to launch and beyond.
  • improve your ability to communicate with ML experts and non-experts alike.

*Is the course for you? See what people are saying about it

“I was simply blown away by the quality of her presentation. This was a 6-hour(!) tour de force; through every minute of it, Cassie was clear, funny, energetic, approachable, insightful and informative.”Hal Ableson, Professor of Computer Science at MIT

“I cannot emphasize enough how valuable it was that this course was targeted towards a general audience.” — Human resources specialist

“Fantastic class, plus it is hilarious!” — Software engineer

“I now feel more confident in my understanding of ML… Loved it.” — Communications manager

“More useful than any of the courses I took in university on this stuff.” — Reliability engineer

“I loved how she structured the course, knowing the content, and navigating this full-day course without getting us bored. So I learned two things in this lesson. 1) Machine learning, and 2) Presentation skills.” — Executive

“Great Stuff: I would recommend it.” — ML Research Scientist

“…always interesting and keeps my attention.” — Senior leader, Engineering

“…well structured, clear, pitched in at the right level for people like me and full of useful visuals and stories to help me understand and remember. I learnt a ton.” — Senior leader, Sales

“The MFML class was phenomenal. It laid the foundation for understanding best practices and boosted my confidence in attempting to apply ML.” — Product technology manager

“For once I feel like I’ve understood 90%+ of the content. Usually I am lost all the time, feel extremely stupid and want to cry.” — Program manager

“Much more high-level than the other courses, but also more general and more complete. Offers a great general view of the topic… filled a lot of the “holes” that I had. It really demystifies a lot of things.” — Software engineer

“Although I studied and used ML in the past (~8 years ago) but got tired of it so I wasn’t very interested in the recent trend… After this refresh I feel I can rebuild this relationship and be friends with ML again.” — Product manager

“Otherwise esoteric material was made accessible and enjoyable thanks to Cassie’s deep subject matter expertise, wit, and humor.” — User experience designer

If you liked it then you should have put a share on it…

There’s a lot of garbage out there, so on the off-chance that you think this course is better than most alternatives, please help it stand out above the noise by sharing it with your community: bit.ly/mf-ml

Beyond machine learning

If you’re interested in branching out into data science topics beyond ML, check out my minicourses on:

Still looking for course links?

Here they are again:

If you liked the course, please share the course playlist with a friend: bit.ly/mf-ml …and if you hated it, please share it with an enemy — that way, everyone wins!

P.S. Have you ever tried hitting the clap button here on Medium more than once to see what happens? ❤️

Connect with Cassie Kozyrkov

Let’s be friends! You can find me on Twitter, YouTube, Substack, and LinkedIn. Interested in having me speak at your event? Use this form to get in touch.

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Cassie Kozyrkov

Chief Decision Scientist, Google. ❤️ Stats, ML/AI, data, puns, art, theatre, decision science. All views are my own. twitter.com/quaesita