alt Hacker NewsWell, no ... For a start any "AI" course 20 years ago probably wouldn't have even mentioned neural nets, and certainly not as a mainstream technique.
A 20yr old "AI" curriculum would have looked more like the 3rd edition of Russel & Norvig's "Artificial Intelligence - A Modern Approach".
https://github.com/yanshengjia/ml-road/blob/master/resources...
Karpathy's videos aren't an AI (except in modern sense of AI=LLMs) course, or a machine learning course, or even a neural network course for that matter (despite the title) - it's really just "From Zero to LLMs".
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My introductory course used that exact textbook and I still have it on my shelf :).
It has a chapter or two on NNs and even mentions back propagation in the index, but the majority of the book focuses elsewhere.
Anyone who watches the videos and follows along will indeed come up to speed on the basics of neural nets, at least with respect to MLPs. It's an excellent introduction.
I think they meant the result— not the content—would be the same.
Neural nets were taught in my Uni in the late 90s. They were presented as the AI technique, which was however computationally infeasible at the time. Moreover, it was clearly stated that all supporting ideas were developed and researched 20 years prior, and the field was basically stagnated due to hardware not being there.