[News] The Siraj Raval Controversy

there is a massive controversy going on right now and in the middle is Suraj revolved prominent youtuber so today I'll just be actually shortly reporting on this not giving too much opinion just kind of um stating what's up in a very high-level overview because if you haven't heard of this I think it's important that you do and this is both sad and funny to a degree more sad actually but you know make your own opinions so serologist is very prominent youtuber that makes videos mostly let's say coding tutorials or explaining short concepts in the field of machine learning and recently also branched out into other fields like here watch me build a marketing startup and so on so what happened it was two recent developments first of all he offered a course and the course was two hundred dollars and this is a one of his students on Twitter and many more have come out and he offered this course for $200 and basically said make money with machine learning that was the course and he said he will going he was going to take 500 students in this course and it would be personalized learning personalized support from basically from him or he said he is all in into this course then the students discovered that there were actually over a thousand people in the course and there was always almost no personalized support so there's only he was what giving 50 minutes of which is weekly time to do Q& A 30 minutes of video content and they apparently also replied to all the code submissions with the exact same so things like this he actually split up the students into two different slack groups so they wouldn't notice that there are over a thousand people so about two five hundred people groups then people wanted to wanted a refund and then apparently when he hid the slack limit he transferred them to discord and he had it everyone that wanted a refund to discord shuttle and then simply banned them I mean that yeah but and there are many more stories of students about this course apparently this was kind of really a bit of a scam this course without especially that the refunds there was no refund policy and then about two weeks I think into the course there was a refund policy so after two weeks after the course started and the refund policy said you can get a refund within two weeks of the course starting and so this I mean this is all just kind of really weird and I encourage you to read up more on this because there are many more father like stories about this course so he apologized publicly and said he shouldn't have done that he should have hired TAS and so on that so you apologized for it and that seemed to be kind of the end of that I don't exactly know what happened to the students some claims they never got a refund and so on but then it went on and it went on badly for Suraj if I may say because he published a paper called the neural cubed and people have gone and it turns out that it is almost all plagiarized from one or two other papers actually yeah it turns out it's I think it's two papers and it's almost all plagiarized from there and you can see on the left the green sections and on the right the red sections are exactly identical for example this table up here I think it's on the next page of the other paper is exactly this from the other paper if you look at whatever these equations they're all the same the sentences are exactly the same and so on he only changed like that also the dick diagrams you see her on the upper left exactly taken from this other paper and

I think he mentions this other paper cites it once and he says his work is kind of a derivative of that or leaned on that and so on but these aren't explicitly quotes here the only changes he made or changed his like so whenever the other paper says we can write the combined transformation here you can see he says I can write and thanks to the CV encoding I get a non linear functional I mean there's a rule in computer science the only person who's allowed to do this is Don Knuth no one else that's I mean that's wholly rule broken okay so more seriously he changed that and then he also kind of used a couple of synonyms which may make no sense so for example he replaced the word gate by the word door and of course a logic gate it becomes a logic door so here it's a non-gaussian gate phi and i don't know if in this instance but in this instance he replaced it was it oh no here it actually says gate but sometimes it's replaced by PI door and also he replaced the word complex Hilbert space too complicated Hilbert space which makes no sense at all so this uh yeah it's it kind it's funny and sad at the same time so this and again he's apologizing this is icing claims that mineral cubed favorites partly plagiarized this is true and he basically claims it he sort of blames it he says he's doing too many videos a week which I agree I mean I can tell you that making videos is hard even crappy videos like mine and his are actually edited and so on but they the problem is many people more came out and said that he did the same thing to their project here you see someone he did exact same thing to our project it took four people a couple of months due he acted like it was his own and many more came out and said he plagiarized other things as well where he basically just takes code and gives minimal or no attribution to the original authors and then passed it off as his own this after this course yeah everyone this could not get any worse Suraj oh my gosh quantum doors yeah so this all happened I mean I encourage you go read up on it to make up your own mind I don't just want to point out quickly the end and I won't actually show the identity of the person I'm posting this if you really want to find out but it's not about that person it's about the kind of sentiment so there is a sentiment around that you should kind of unfollow him and because that lends credibility to him and there is a point to be made of that kind of if the kind of prominent researchers refer to him and so on that gives him some credibility but I'm also very much against sort of cancel culture it is also the case that he know like no matter how much is plagiarized has popularized the field more than anyone else and me maybe you know there is a conversation to be had and a lesson to be learned without immediately canceling someone that's just so that I mean there's it's a complicated issue but just kind of want to get this out there so go read up on this is all it's yeah it's a wild world so that being said but I have found