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Ask HN: What is Lex Fridman's association with MIT?

9•chirau•8h ago

Is he staff? Is he a professor? Did he attend MIT? None of those things check out.

Comments

ComplexSystems•8h ago

He taught classes and and was in charge of their online deep learning materials for a while at deeplearning.mit.edu, back when the idea of universities putting materials online was still very new and cutting edge. A lot of his video lectures are still on his channel.

chirau•8h ago

Ah good to know. Is he permanent staff or he did this as a guest lecturer or something?

fandorin•6h ago

no, Lex has barely any connection to MIT. He taught (only once) a January community class, that’s all. If you want to get the full picture, I recommend watching this video: https://youtu.be/Z1Ua1hVRtdE

VirusNewbie•6h ago

This is not accurate, you can look up the fact that he was a paid research scientist. Why are you using a poorly sourced youtube video to inform an opinion that you then repeat without doing any research?

Don't people feel embarrassed by being this easily swayed?

spotlw•6h ago

He made a video on this (https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZlnRlYvPvbs) where he explains he is a research scientist at MIT, but was only active from 2015 to 2020 when he switched focus to his podcast.

He published 15 first author papers during that time period: https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=wZH_N7cAAAAJ

His research group at MIT: https://lids.mit.edu/people/research-staff

thorin•42m ago

Lex gets a lot of hate, probably mainly for political reasons and the way he manages his public persona. However not many people can argue with the fact he has probably the best collection of programmer interview/podcasts out there. If that's what you're into you probably won't find anything better:

e.g.

Carmack Brian Kernighan Gosling Guido DHH Demis Bjarne

List it endless, and something to be celebrated I think.