[News] The Siraj Raval Controversy
machine learning siraj controversy scam scammer fraud plagiarism plagiarized course refund policy ai online hype credit attribution paper scandal news twitter neural qubit intellectual property
Popular ML YouTuber Siraj Raval is in the middle of not just one, but two controversies: First, a lot of students of his 200$ online-course have accused him of breaking major promises he made when advertising the course and denying them refunds. Second, his paper on "The Neural Qubit" appears to be plagiarized almost verbatim.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/d7ad2y/d_siraj_raval_potentially_exploiting_students/
https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/dh2xfs/d_siraj_has_a_new_paper_the_neural_qubit_its/
 There is a massive controversy going on right now and in the middle is Siraj Raval, a prominent YouTuber. So today I'll just be actually shortly reporting on this, not giving too much opinion, just kind of 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 Siraj is this 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 $200. And this is 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 was going to take 500 students in this course and it would be personal and it would be a very, very high level. He said 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 almost no personalized support. So there's only, he was giving 50 minutes of his weekly time to do Q&A, 30 minutes of video content and apparently he also replied to all the code submissions with the exact same email. 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, 500 people groups. Then people wanted a refund and then apparently when he hit the Slack limit, he transferred them to Discord and he added everyone that wanted a refund to Discord channel and then simply banned them. I mean, yeah. 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 the refunds. There was no refund policy and then he sent the students to Discord and they were like, oh, I want to see. Then about two weeks, I think, into the course there was a refund policy. After two weeks after the course started and the refund policy said you can get a refund within two weeks of the course starting. So this, I mean, this is all just kind of really, really weird. I encourage you to read up more on this because there are many more stories about this course. So he apologized publicly and said he shouldn't have done that, he should have hired TAs and so on. He 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 claimed they never got a refund and so on. But then it went on and it went on badly for Siraj, if I may say, because he published a paper called The Neural Cubit 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. 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, also the diagrams, you see here on the upper left, exactly taken from this other paper. I think he mentions this other paper, he 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 are changes like, so whenever the other paper says we can write the combined transformation, here you can see he says I can write. Thanks to the CV encoding, I get a nonlinear functional. There's a rule in computer science. The only person who's allowed to do this is Don Knuth. No one else. That's wholly rule broken. So more seriously, he changed that and then he also kind of used a couple of synonyms which make no sense. So, for example, he replaced the word gate by the word door and of course a logic gate then becomes a logic door. So here it's a non-Gaussian gate, phi. I don't know if in this instance, but in this instance he replaced it. Here it actually says gate, but sometimes it's replaced by door and also he replaced the word complex Hilbert space to complicated Hilbert space which makes no sense at all. So this, yeah, it's funny and sad at the same time. So this happened and again he's apologizing. He says I've seen claims that my neural qubit was 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 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 the exact same thing to our project. It took four people a couple of months to do. 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. Hold my gas in quantum doors. Yeah. So this all happened. I mean, I encourage you to go read up on it to make up your own mind. I 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, like no matter how much he's plagiarized, has popularized the field more than anyone else. And 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 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 it's yeah, it's a wild world. So that being said, bye bye. Have fun.
 There is a massive controversy going on right now and in the middle is Siraj Raval, a prominent
 YouTuber. So today I'll just be actually shortly reporting on this, not giving too much opinion,
 just kind of 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 Siraj is this 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 $200. And this is 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 was going to
 take 500 students in this course and it would be personal and it would be a very, very
 high level. He said 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 almost no personalized support. So there's only, he was giving 50
 minutes of his weekly time to do Q&A, 30 minutes of video content and apparently he also replied
 to all the code submissions with the exact same email. 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, 500 people groups. Then people wanted a refund
 and then apparently when he hit the Slack limit, he transferred them to Discord and
 he added everyone that wanted a refund to Discord channel and then simply banned them.
 I mean, yeah. 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 the refunds. There
 was no refund policy and then he sent the students to Discord and they were like, oh,
 I want to see. Then about two weeks, I think, into the course there was a refund policy.
 After two weeks after the course started and the refund policy said you can get a refund
 within two weeks of the course starting. So this, I mean, this is all just kind of really,
 really weird. I encourage you to read up more on this because there are many more stories
 about this course. So he apologized publicly and said he shouldn't have done that, he
 should have hired TAs and so on. He 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 claimed they never got
 a refund and so on. But then it went on and it went on badly for Siraj, if I may say,
 because he published a paper called The Neural Cubit 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. 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, also the diagrams,
 you see here on the upper left, exactly taken from this other paper. I think he mentions
 this other paper, he 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 are changes like, so whenever the other paper says we can write the combined
 transformation, here you can see he says I can write. Thanks to the CV encoding, I get
 a nonlinear functional. There's a rule in computer science. The only person who's allowed
 to do this is Don Knuth. No one else. That's wholly rule broken. So more seriously, he
 changed that and then he also kind of used a couple of synonyms which make no sense.
 So, for example, he replaced the word gate by the word door and of course a logic gate
 then becomes a logic door. So here it's a non-Gaussian gate, phi. I don't know if in
 this instance, but in this instance he replaced it. Here it actually says gate, but sometimes
 it's replaced by door and also he replaced the word complex Hilbert space to complicated
 Hilbert space which makes no sense at all. So this, yeah, it's funny and sad at the same
 time. So this happened and again he's apologizing. He says I've seen claims that my neural
 qubit was 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 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 the exact same thing to our project. It
 took four people a couple of months to do. 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. Hold my gas
 in quantum doors. Yeah. So this all happened. I mean, I encourage you to go read up on it
 to make up your own mind. I 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, like no matter how much he's plagiarized, has
 popularized the field more than anyone else. And 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 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 it's yeah, it's a wild world. So that being said,
 bye bye. Have fun.