Hot Commodity

Andrej Karpathy is holding a classroom full of Stanford grad students and undergrads rapt with his description of the pros and cons of different kinds of algorithms used in training a neural network to recognize objects in an image. Suddenly, from the middle of the room, the distinctive artificial voice of Apple's Siri pipes up: "I'm not sure what you said." Siri, probably activated accidentally, draws big laughs. In this room, where students are deep into the intricacies of learning how to make software that better understands humans and our data, the error message is a reminder of the technology's exploding real-world applications. As a consequence, the students in Karpathy's class are likely to graduate into a favorable job market.