附近上门

Sebastian Thrun, the of was interviewed today at TechCrunch Disrupt鈥檚 SF event. His appearance was likely driven by how quickly the online education platform has grown over the past few years.

Follow 附近上门 News on &

Udacity partners with tech companies to co-design courses and provide scholarships to its service. In response to the tech industry鈥檚 needs, Udacity is currently focusing on teaching the mechanics of AI. Luckily, its teacher is well-suited to the task.

Thrun is known as the godfather of AI and machine learning. In 2005, his team won the with their robot 鈥淪tanley.鈥� He also founded Google X in 2010 and led its self-driving car team. It just so happens that one of Udacity鈥檚 most well-known and competitive programs concerns , which has received 50,000 applicants.

Due to the program鈥檚 high barrier of entry and prerequisites including advanced programming knowledge, Thrun admitted that not everyone will make the cut. However, Udacity teaches aspiring applicants what they need to do to get accepted into the course. To address financial challenges, Udacity has also (which has its own self-driving car ambitions) to provide 400 full scholarships for the 鈥淚ntro to Self-Driving Cars鈥� program.

But like many tech leaders in Silicon Valley, Thrun has a passion for projects outside of self-driving cars.

AI For Everything

Thrun not only wants self-driving cars, he鈥檚 working on making flying cars a reality. As CEO of , Thrun envisions that everyone should have access to flying as a means of personal transportation, given that air is 鈥渇ree of stuff,鈥� 鈥渟afer than rail,鈥� and helps people avoid bad traffic.

While Thrun agrees that there鈥檚 a lot of opportunity in the drone delivery space, he thinks that 鈥淸flying] should not just be for packages, but also for people.鈥� Thrun sees that flying cars will take place in the near future, since 鈥渢here鈥檚 no technical reason why it can鈥檛 be done; it鈥檚 more of a societal reason.鈥�

Thrun also got to talk about a project led by students from his lab at Stanford. Using the open-source ML library Tensor Flow, the team classify cancerous skin patches better and more accurately than top-notch dermatologists.

Thrun truly believes that AI has limitless applications, and brought his innovator spirit on stage: 鈥淚 love thinking about the world as a playground where everything interesting has not been invented yet.鈥�

Perhaps, the Udacity course on self-driving cars will attract competitors, or the company may have a flying car program just around the corner.