Twitxy Saved

Chris Piech

Verified account This account is verified. Learn more

@chrispiech

Education + AI. Assistant Professor of Computer Science Education at Stanford University. Grew up in 🇰🇪 and 🇲🇾.
Stanford, CA stanford.edu/~cpiech/ Joined April 2010
308 Following 6.8K Followers 436 Posts

Latest posts 5

Pinned post

Chris Piech Verified account @chrispiech
Exciting news! For the first time since Code in Place, I am launching a new online course. It is called Probability for AI and it was made for you and your loved ones: pai.stanford.edu

Probability for AI is a course that teaches you the math language that AI speaks. The class has no prerequisites. By the end of 6 weeks you will have a deep understanding of how neural networks work and you will have built a portfolio of sharable apps (made using our free Code Agent tools).

The secret sauce is a massive community of teachers. I have a hypothesis that as a society we drastically underestimate how many folks would love to spend 10 hours a year teaching others. Teaching is community service and teaching is a way to deeply understand a subject. The students get the highest quality free course possible, but I think its the teachers who get the best experience.

Applications are due at the end of September. Come join! And please reshare this post with your friends.

Apply as a student and build an AI Word Detective with a Coding Agent: pai.stanford.edu/apply/pai1/stu…

Apply as a teacher and practice teaching our teachable agents: pai.stanford.edu/apply/pai1/sl

Even if you don't end up joining the class you might enjoy the application process! Thanks to everyone who made this possible. I am truly appreciative that Stanford supports me teaching classes for the world. See you in class. Please repost and spread the word. The more the merrier.
16 replies 29 reposts 223 likes 11K views View on X
Chris Piech Verified account @chrispiech
I stand by this quote! “I think the upper bound of the number of people who would spend 10 hours [a year] teaching could be close to a billion people,” Piech said. “It’s just a human thing to want to pass on knowledge, and maybe we’ve put too many barriers to prevent people from spending their 10 hours.”

Thanks @StanfordDaily

stanforddaily.com/2026/09/28/cre…
stanforddaily.com Creators of Code in Place champion human connection in two new courses The online courses aim to connect students while teaching in an era dominated by AI.
0 replies 1 reposts 12 likes 751 views View on X
Chris Piech Verified account @chrispiech
This one cool prompting trick will get you conditional probabilities :-).

For an education research project, @juliettewoodrow and I needed a principled way to get p(x|y), where x was student work and y was a summary of the student. Pretty classic problem.
We ended up writing a paper about it! Coming out at COLM. The key idea: use contrastive estimation theory to derive a better way to prompt LLMs for probabilities.

stanford.edu/~cpiech/bio/pa…