AI Guru makes $238,800 with misleading paid course. doesn't credit developers. | Siraj Raval FGF

Suraj Suraj rush rush rush rush rush Suraj Raval guys this kind of sucks I don't want to make this video I'm actually serious I like Suraj for fall and I've liked his videos I've enjoyed some of his videos in the past if you don't know he's a machine-learning guy hello world it's Suraj and it's not just a couple of industries that machine learning is affecting it's every single industry but he stepped into the fake guru house when he made a two hundred dollar course that mislead people which we will get into in a second so unfortunately I cannot just because I like somebody not do a video on him when I'm trying to educate consumers about future choices so unfortunately I have to do this video let me say first that as someone in the educational space who's made an oopsie before I get it okay and and kind of have a first-hand understanding of people making mistakes you know learning from it growing from it but there have been some people alleging that in Suraj's case this is not a one-off problem this is not a one-time oopsie this is sort of a pattern of behavior I've made a severe and continuous that I will leave up to you guys I am just going to cover the facts of the case and we're gonna talk about some of the larger problems that people have brought up this is with the intent of educating you because this is not Suraj's first course so I cannot just let this go because there's probably going to be a course in the future and when there is and when there's another Siraj Raval course I want you to be educated without further ado let's jump into it here's the course that Suraj revolve pitched so I've decided to make the highest value course I possibly could call make money with machine learning now there's a lot here that's sort of a problem but the biggest thing is he says that he was going to limit his course to 500 students in order to give them personalized instruction and I'm only accepting 500 students so that I can give each of them personalized education and guidance and everything was going fine until people started to notice there were messages going on there were works that didn't make sense so people did a little digging around and they found out and by the way this is a registrar article which kind of sums up the whole situation in better detail than I will they found out that there were two separate workspaces that Siraj had set up one of them had 770 students one of them had 500 students and essentially Suraj had been duplicitous about his stopping the course at 500 students because he was gonna keep it all personal and whatever and give them personalized instruction and I'm we accepting 500 students and he got a little well got a little greedy he decided to keep letting people in the course and when he did he tried to basically lie about it and keep it from everyone from knowing by creating two separate slack groups that didn't have any idea of their the other person's existence long story short everyone finds out everyone gets pretty upset and they start realizing that Suraj is not giving the personalized experience that a lot of them are wanting so at this point people are pretty pissed off and they start to look around and maybe say okay well we kind of need a refund and this is kind of where it goes south okay so the first thing that happens is everyone gets moved to discord because allegedly Suraj didn't want to pay for the slack like fee of setting up a professional slack so once he got to the message limit he moved everyone over to discord a--when he did people started mentioning the word refund for a lot of reasons because a lot of them said you know the course wasn't up to expectation etc etc when that started happening people who were mentioning refund in the comments started to get their message deleted automatically and some of them were saying they were getting banned again this is all in this registrar report and finally the cries for refunds got to like a fever pitch and so Suraj couldn't ignore them anymore and so at this point Suraj actually mentions that in fact there was a refund policy that no one had heard about he ignored us until it blew up last weekend one student said in the midst of all this he snuck up up a refund policy saying the refund had to be asked within 14 days of registration and pretended that it was all there all along which is ludicrous because there was no fun policy initially and the policy was posted four weeks after the registration start date so what does that mean that means that he puts he puts the start of registration four weeks ago and then at four weeks later he goes oh well you guys should have taken advantage of the 14-day refund policy and everyone goes wait there was no refund policy he added it after the fact according to like the page history of where you put the refund policy and I don't know if he intentionally made it in a time frame where people were literally couldn't get refunds at that point but it seems like he did and at one point Suresh in an email to somebody who says hey since we're more than halfway for the course the refund policy is now ended however I'd like to give you a special discount code up to a hundred percent off my next three courses as if that's gonna make people happy it's that that's ridiculous so eventually everyone's getting even more pissed off because they're like wait you didn't give us a refund policy and wait you know this is this is all made up and in fact if you do not provide a refund policy at the time of someone buying your thing there's an automatic 30-day refund policy so when finally Suraj gets called out to the point where he can absolutely no longer ignore it and after he's tried to basically get people to accept no refund and only accept like you know future courses which is kind of a lame thing if you just spent $200 and of course you hate why would you want more of Suraj's courses so finally he makes this statement on Twitter and he goes I saw some dota there unsatisfied I'd like to apologize I'm gonna send refunds to the students who asked with it one within 30 days of purchase and a lot of people just saw this is a very last-minute sort of cop-out because he had done everything he could up to that point to not let people get refunds so that's where a lot of the stopped and for me that was like okay maybe that's maybe it was somebody who just did not have an experience with a course and maybe you know this is just a one-off kind of thing but then bigger alligator I mean in my opinion bigger allegations started coming out about Suraj specifically with Udacity so apparently I didn't I didn't know this Suraj had a a course with Udacity and at the meeting they had to have an intervention with him because he was basically stealing people's code for for his sessions so one of the things that the registrar accuses him of is basically stealing people's github code which is kind of a big deal and something that Suraj very strongly says that he doesn't do Suraj says that he actually credited the author every time in the associated github reap read me show me a counterexample which is at this point I mean this is just what a what a show the guys from Udacity come in and they basically slam dunk him they go oh no not with working with us we literally had an intervention meeting involving multiple directors including myself to explain to you how non-action was bad even the director of video production was involved it was so blatant that non-tech had to point it out so this so this is pretty serious stuff because this is another course that he's getting accused of this with and it's anyway it's just really unfortunate it sucks it really does suck but I started to do some digging and it does not seem to be an isolated case it doesn't seem to be just with Udacity it doesn't just seem to be with this course where shady stuff is going on Suraj has claimed that he credits authors is misleading at best so I want to demonstrate one of those cases for you right now of how Suraj does not properly credit people who he takes code from and he's done that he does this a lot I mean basically all nearly all of his videos are in some way basically most of the code is taken from other people with very minimal changes so I'm just gonna show you an example of that so this is Suraj's video watch me build a training bot okay so let's just start this video first of all watch me build a trading bot what does that imply it implies okay I built this thing I mean very clearly I watch as I build you would think based on everything here that he's building this thing in Suraj and I've built an automated trading but I built an automated trading bot right I built I did it it was me I built the automated trading bot this video I'm gonna show you how I built it how I built it how I bet you know I built it okay here's the thing when you actually go to code for this video first of all it takes you to his github page right this is his github page it's kind of a long story but the normal way you're supposed to do it is they're supposed to Fork and not just clone to an your own rip repo with no git history but anyway that's a long story if you go to his starter code and then scroll all the way to the bottom this is Suraj's idea of credit credits credits go to ask Mike for the starter code I have no idea how much credit actually Mike did because this says starter code right Suraj built it how I built it maybe he just built a little bit off of Mike's starter code okay let's go check that out so what a friend of mine who's way smarter than me did was he helped me do this like merge thing where we got the original github code ask Mike's github code and then we got Suraj's github code which Suraj does not fork or fork from ask Mike so I asked Mike probably has no idea that this guy has basically taken his code it's that's kind of a long story I'll let someone who's like more computer science he explained why that's kind of bad basically he's taking credit without real attribution except in like name only but basically this is the difference between the two github pages right and here's that here here's the headline okay every time it's there's this arrow like this this is something that actually gets taken out and anytime there's an error like this it gets put into the code this these are the only differences this is out this is in put back into the code so basically he just changes the readme that's all he did he changes the readme he deletes the guys read me he takes all the guys code the starter code is all the code and he takes the guys readme deletes all the guys readme and puts in his own thing and then he goes oh yeah this is the code for this video by Siraj called watch me build a training bot and then he deletes all the other guys and at the very bottom makes this tiny thing and go see oh yeah the guy gave me starter code no he gave you all the code he gave you all the code this is not this is not attribution saying saying somebody gave me a starter script and it's the whole script is not attribution saying someone gave starter code not forking cloning your own repo deleting the get history so no one can see what's going on delete the original author can't see that you link them can't see that you took their code and then just crediting with starter code at the bottom of a second footnoted page from your original video that you call watch me build a training bot how I built it genuinely genuinely I like the guy or I like the guy style of teaching I think he's a good educator but this this kind of behaviour just like it's anyway it's pretty bad it's pretty bad but I'm not trying to like dunk on the guy here but I but I am trying to as in as like a consumer alert thing just be aware of this kind of thing and it's just a consistent pattern of behavior I mean Suraj you know he might be excused if he could reasonably claim that he doesn't know how to use github because his github practices are kind of frowned upon but he literally makes a video called how to use github where he explains where explains how to fork how to fork things how to fork things but he doesn't do it and eventually we maybe find the reason why github is a social network and you can follow other developers to keep up to date with their latest code the more developers that follow you the more likely developers will contribute to your open-source project currently linus torvalds is the most followed developer out of 28 million on github and right now I'm number 15 so watch out Linus I said I think I think I don't know this is a little bit speculation I think that's maybe why Suraj uses github the way he does I think maybe he's chasing I know Klout is I don't have clouds the right word but I not crediting developers properly he's able to basically gather a following on github who thinks who reasonably thinks unless they really do their due diligence Suraj is the one who made this thing you would think Suraj Maeda I mean after all that's starter code starter code equals changing the readme so yeah anyway there's a lot more evidence on here I'll link some stuff below honestly this is like a very shallow dive into all this stuff there's this huge reddit thread about documenting a lot of these problems and if you just look at our slash machine learning you find a lot of people who are disgruntled because Suraj used their code in a video never credits them properly and you know there's anyway there's all these problems so I think a lot of his problems would be solved to be credited people properly and if he didn't try to mislead people about return policies and how many students were gonna be in his course like all of this seems to be of Suraj's own making when in reality he has a great platform he's a good educator yeah I feel like I don't know I don't know why he's doing this so that's the video sorry guys sorry it's not so fun and exciting I am a little bit I'm a little bummed out but at the same time I wanted to let you guys know what's going on in the community and obviously Suraj walked into the fake guru house and unfortunately you can't walk in without getting a coffee Zilla video made about you that's just the way it is yeah so that's it [Music] but never to the trust [Music]

Channel: Coffeezilla

Views: 638,135

Keywords: siraj raval, make money with machine learning, fake guru, coffeezilla, AI, machine learning, reddit, scam, make money, learn AI

Id: 7jmBE4yPrOs

Length: 15min 32sec (932 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 04 2019