Alexandr (Alex) Wang

And my freshman advisor, the person who I had to get all my courses approved with, was the professor of that course.

This just happened to be the case.

And I signed up for her course, and then she said,

you're a freshman, you're not gonna, you know, this is gonna be too much for you.

And I was like, oh, just give me a chance.

Like, you know, I just want to try it.

Like, I'm really passionate about the topic.

And she's like, okay, well, we'll let you go till the first, you know, for the first few weeks and see how you do.

And so then I get in and then I remember I was like, I felt like the stakes were really high because I wanted to like prove that I could do this.

And so the first test rolls around

and uh i think by like sheer luck it just happened to mostly be about things that like like there were a lot of things in the course i didn't understand but happening about stuff that i did understand in the course pretty well and i got like one of the top marks in that course and there were like hundreds of people in this class um and so then after that point the professor let me do whatever i wanted and then uh

And so then I went really deep into AI and all the AI coursework at MIT.

And then this was the year when DeepMind, this AI company out of London, came out with AlphaGo, which was the first AI that beat the best Go players in the world, which was viewed at that point as like,

probably the hardest strategy game or the hardest sort of like, yeah, the hardest strategy game for AIs to beat.

And that was a big deal.

And then I started tinkering with AI on my own.

So I built, I wanted to build like a camera inside my fridge that would tell me when my roommates were stealing my food.

And so I started tinkering with it, and then I pretty quickly realized kind of what we were talking about earlier, that data was going to be like, that everything was going to be blocked on data.

Like, if we, no matter what you wanted AI to do,

that was going to rely on data to make the AI do those things.