[yorwba]

It's not just China. At my German university all courses related to AI/ML/data mining/stats are oversubscribed by a factor of 2 to 5. One professor went so far as to stress that he didn't have any experience with deep learning and he'd only cover Bayesian statistics in order to discourage students. I don't think it worked.

I'm pretty sure that there's a similar surge of interest in all countries.

[kamaal]

>>I'm pretty sure that there's a similar surge of interest in all countries.

Yup. Same here in India.

People talk as though singularity is next year or so, and like Y2K jobs they have to do AI programming jobs.

Went to campus hiring like a few weeks back. And everyone had one or two show-and-tell AI/ML projects on their resume. Like every one. Everything from fitness apps to face emotion recognition.

[nradov]

Those students will be awfully disappointed when they graduate and discover that most commercial software development work involves just shuffling bits around with no AI in sight.

[internet555]

I could be quite wrong but wouldn’t a course in Bayesian statistics be a lot more useful for someone interested in inference or however you will say it?

[cschmidt]

It would certainly be useful. I'm interviewing a lot of people for ML roles, and I've noticed a new group of "deep learning only" people coming out of colleges. They know their DL, but have no exposure to what I guess we're calling "traditional ML". Since DL isn't appropriate for all problems, they don't have the skills we want.