My Story

In 2019, at the peak of my YouTube channel's growth, I made the worst mistakes of my career.

I launched a paid machine learning course and let enrollment run to over 1,200 students after promising I'd cap it at 500. I couldn't deliver the individual attention I'd promised at that scale. Around the same time, I published a research paper on neural qubits that contained passages taken from other researchers' work without proper attribution.

Both things were wrong. Both were my fault. There's no version of this story where they weren't.

I apologized publicly, refunded the students who asked, and withdrew the paper. Then I watched the audience I'd spent years building walk away, and I deserved a lot of that. The internet's judgment was fast and loud, and underneath the pile-on there was a true thing: I had moved too fast, promised too much, and cut corners that should never be cut. Especially by someone whose whole job was teaching.

What the internet doesn't usually record is what happens after.

I kept teaching, mostly for free. I rebuilt slowly: tutorials, open source, a decade of showing up. I wrote a book about building software with AI, published by Wiley. I got married. I became a father. I started over in a new country as an immigrant, building a company and doing the unglamorous work of being trustworthy over time instead of impressive overnight.

In 2026 I made THE LAST EXAM, a short film about a teacher in Kerala who bets her school on twelve kids. I wrote it, directed it, scored it, and produced every frame alone, for ninety dollars in AI credits. It reached hundreds of thousands of people, and the founder of the XPRIZE called it something worth loving. It's the most honest thing I've ever made, and it exists because of everything above, not despite it.

If you found this page because you searched my name and the internet showed you 2019 first: that happened, it was real, and I own it. But it was one chapter, and I've spent seven years writing the ones after it. I teach, I build, I make films, and I try to be the kind of educator I should have been from the start.

The work is the apology. I intend to keep making it.

— Siraj