learning

The first lecture of Stanford's Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning course, taught by Chris Manning and Richard Socher. It introduces NLP and word vectors, including SVD, skip-gram, CBOW, negative sampling and word2vec.

The introductory lecture of Richard Hamming's capstone course, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn. It focuses on style of thinking and on educating rather than training, using technical material only as illustration.

Bill Dally of NVIDIA gives a University of Washington lecture on trends in deep learning hardware. It covers numeric formats, specialized instructions, energy per operation and co-design of hardware and software.

The final lecture of Richard Hamming's Learning to Learn course, from 1995, based on his well-known talk 'You and Your Research'. It covers how to do important work and build a career.

Sacha Arnoud, Waymo's Director of Engineering, gives a lecture in MIT's 2018 deep learning for self-driving cars course on the rise of machine learning in autonomous vehicles. It covers how Waymo uses deep learning and how it handles tricky driving situations.

The first lecture of David MacKay's Cambridge course on information theory, pattern recognition and neural networks. It introduces the core ideas of his book Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms.

The first lecture of Stanford's CS231n course on convolutional neural networks for visual recognition. It surveys the history and key challenges of computer vision, from the Cambrian explosion and Hubel and Wiesel to ImageNet.

A 15-minute clip of linguist Stephen Krashen discussing language acquisition, drawn from the 1980s. It presents his input hypothesis and the distinction between acquisition and learning.

Harvard physicist Eric Mazur explains how he realized his students were memorizing rather than understanding, and how he changed his teaching. He presents peer instruction and data showing improved student performance.

Peter Norvig's UBC distinguished lecture on how massive amounts of simple data, such as for language modeling, can yield understanding that hand-built models could not.

A university lecture from CS480/680 by Pascal Poupart on attention mechanisms and transformer networks, worked through on a chalkboard.

Geoffrey Hinton gives an MIT talk on what is wrong with convolutional neural networks and introduces his capsules project. The description points to the capsule network papers.

A lecture from the 1980s by linguist Stephen Krashen on how people acquire language. He explains his comprehensible input hypothesis for second-language acquisition.

Leo Dirac explains how transformer models have replaced LSTMs in NLP. He gives background from bag of words through RNNs and LSTMs, then a technical deep dive into multi-headed self-attention and positional encoding, with sample code.

An eight-minute excerpt of a 1983 video featuring Seymour Papert, creator of Logo, on children learning programming and abstract ideas through embodied play. It shows kids acting out the Logo turtle.

John Gustafson presents posits, a proposed drop-in replacement for IEEE 754 floats that is simpler in hardware and more flexible in precision. The seminar includes a live demo and machine learning results.

Richard Hamming's 1995 recording of his talk 'You and Your Research', drawn from his graduate engineering course. He discusses how great scientists pick important problems and build careers, drawing on his years at Bell Labs.

Andrej Karpathy's first Neural Networks: Zero to Hero lecture, which builds micrograd, a tiny autograd engine, from scratch in Python. It explains backpropagation and neural network training step by step, assuming only basic Python and some high-school calculus.

Andrej Karpathy's three-hour-plus general-audience deep dive into how ChatGPT-style LLMs are built, covering the full training stack from pretraining to post-training. It also gives mental models for their quirks, like hallucination, and how to use them well.

Psychology professor Marty Lobdell gives a one-hour lecture on how to study effectively, covering short focused sessions with breaks, study environment, note-taking and memory techniques. It was aimed at students who cram without improving.

An RSA Animate drawn from a Sir Ken Robinson talk arguing that current education systems are modeled on the industrial age. It discusses divergent thinking, standardization, and how schools disengage kids.

Larry McEnerney of the University of Chicago Writing Program argues that good writing is defined by what readers value, not by rules or the writer's own ideas. He explains why academic habits fail outside academia and how to write so readers find the work valuable.

Andrej Karpathy builds the GPT tokenizer from scratch, implementing byte pair encoding along with encode and decode. He shows how many odd LLM behaviors trace back to tokenization, and covers Unicode byte encodings along the way.

Geoffrey Hinton's 2025 Royal Institution Discourse on what AI has learned from biological intelligence and how it might surpass it. He explains neural networks and argues that human language use resembles what backpropagation-trained networks do.

Sasha Rush surveys linear RNNs and state space models as replacements for attention in transformer-style models, in a talk for MLSys. It covers the foundational preliminaries and predates Mamba.

First lecture of Stanford's CS106A Programming Methodology by Mehran Sahami, giving a course overview and starting on programming. The course teaches software engineering principles using Java.

Thomas Garrity discusses mathematical maturity, a concept mathematicians use for professional development, and how it can inform teaching, mentoring and careers. It was given at the IAS/PCMI Park City Mathematics Institute.

The first lecture of Gilbert Strang's MIT 18.06 Linear Algebra course, covering the geometry of linear equations. It opens a full 35-lecture university course.

Patrick Winston's long-running MIT lecture on public speaking teaches heuristic rules for talks. It covers how to start, use time and place, boards, props and slides, and how to inform, persuade and finish.

Cognitive scientist George Lakoff lectures on how political debates are framed through language and metaphors tied to values, and on the moral worldviews behind progressive and conservative politics. It was given in 2005 at UC San Diego.

Randy Pausch's 2007 last lecture at Carnegie Mellon, given as he was dying of pancreatic cancer. He reflects on achieving childhood dreams, overcoming obstacles and helping others reach theirs.

A roughly three-hour San Francisco workshop by Marshall Rosenberg on Nonviolent Communication, with full English subtitles added by a fan. He teaches the model with his jackal and giraffe language examples.

Irving Finkel of the British Museum tells how a 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablet came to him for examination. It revealed the oldest known account of Noah's Ark and led to a book and a documentary.

Irving Finkel of the British Museum lectures at the Royal Institution on the invention and decipherment of cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia, and why it is so hard to translate.

Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch gives a lecture on time management at the University of Virginia in 2007. He covers practical habits such as tackling important tasks first and distinguishing important from urgent work.

Leonard Bernstein's 1973 Norton Lectures at Harvard, starting with Musical Phonology. He draws analogies between music and linguistics, including references to Chomsky.

An RSA Animate in which Steven Pinker explains how the mind builds infinite meanings from finite language, and why people often speak indirectly. It covers ambiguity, politeness and mutual knowledge, including the emperor's new clothes example.

The six Norton Lectures Jorge Luis Borges gave in 1967-68, titled This Craft of Verse, on topics including the riddle of poetry, metaphor, storytelling, translation and a poet's creed. The recording runs over four hours.

Robert Sapolsky's Stanford lecture on language, comparing human and animal communication, ape language projects like Koko and Kanzi, and how language is acquired. It is part of his human behavioral biology course.

Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon computer scientist and virtual reality pioneer who was dying of cancer, gives his 'Last Lecture' about achieving childhood dreams and living well. The recording is a full-length talk of about 104 minutes.