Alexandr (Alex) Wang

So, um, uh, they, I think they view, and I respect this belief, uh, you know, I think they view the pursuit of science, the pursuit of knowledge as above all else.

Um,

And, and so I would always tell them, hey, I'm just, you know, this is like a little detour, but ultimately I'm going to come back and, you know, finish my degree and finish my, you know, get a PhD and, you know, I'll be on the straight and narrow.

So that's what I always, what I would always tell them.

But, and then at some point it just didn't be, it wasn't believable.

So I just stopped telling them that.

Why'd you decide to go to school?

I went to school because... Well, there were two things.

One was...

Like genuinely, I wanted to learn a lot about AI very quickly.

And I knew I could kind of do that while working maybe, but the best thing to do really would be to like go to school, like invest all my time into it and try to learn very, very quickly.

And then the second thing was like, you know,

almost anyone, not anyone, but like many, many people, if you ask them like, what were the best years of your life?

Like a lot of people will say their college years.

And so I was like, shit, I can't, I'm not gonna sacrifice the college years.

So yeah, I went to school.

I decided to just go really, really deep into AI.

I took all of the AI courses I could while I was at MIT.

I was only there for a year, but I started out, I remember I took a...

I wanted to take the hardest machine learning course the first semester I got there.