You don't need to have a computer science degree from Stanford to be working on one of Google's hottest teams

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are some of the hottest fields in tech right now. While the terms have kind of become buzzwords in startup land, Google has had teams doing research and building AI-driven applications for years. For example, the company established its "Brain" group five years ago and the team has since penned dozens of papers, built an open-source AI system called TensorFlow, and influenced a bunch of Google products and services like Photos, SmartReply, and speech recognition. The team held a question and answer session yesterday on Reddit, and one of the most striking parts (to someone not entrenched in that world, at least) was reading about the crazy-diverse backgrounds that Google Brain team members have. You might think that to be working at one of the preeminent machine learning groups, you would have to have a degree in computer science from Stanford.