UC San Diego Launches First AI Major Course for 100+ Students

More than 100 undergraduate students enrolled in the University of California San Diego's new artificial intelligence major took their first major-specific course, CSE 25: Intro to AI, over winter quarter. The class aims to introduce AI principles that the students will see repeatedly over the next four years, and level the playing field between students who may have taken AI coursework on their own, and students for whom this is all new material.

UC San Diego's undergraduate AI major – the result of more than a decade of growth in AI teaching and research on campus – is designed to prepare computer science students to build the next generation of AI systems, improve the foundations of the AI systems currently in use, and engage students with the ethical questions surrounding these systems and their impact on society.

The AI major resides within the UC San Diego Department of Computer Science and Engineering, with connections across the entire campus, including other academic departments within the Jacobs School of Engineering and with the Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing. This structure reflects how AI work actually happens in industry – rarely in isolation, always touching adjacent disciplines.

In this first major-specific course, students gained an understanding of what AI is, and experienced the end-to-end AI pipeline from problem formulation and data gathering to modeling, training, evaluation and deployment. In the hands-on, project-based course, students learned about different ways to train AI models; applied programming tools to interact with AI models; and evaluated the societal and ethical implications of AI. They saw the core ideas of AI in the context of realistic applications, building small systems from scratch to experience the design challenges and mathematical foundations of model design, parameter tuning and evaluation.

"The idea is that over the course of the AI major students will see these topics again and again at different levels of depth," said Trevor Bonjour, a UC San Diego computer science teaching professor who taught CSE 25 and is one of the lead faculty in the AI program. "Learning happens with repetition, so for this Intro to AI course we wanted to ensure that all students were exposed to foundational concepts in modern AI systems, including neural networks, that they can build on in future classes."

Over the course of 10 weeks, students explore supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning paradigms, ranging from classical linear models such as perceptrons, to neural networks, language models, and Q-learning agents. The class introduced students to key mathematical tools in AI such as probability, linear algebra, and multivariable calculus. Embedded throughout the course are explorations of how bias shows up in the data and deployment of these models.

Bonjour said he was surprised to learn that roughly a quarter of the students had already taken an AI class before, as a summer course or in their high school. The course's final project — working in a small group to build an AI agent — was designed in such a way that students who did come in with previous experience could develop more advanced AI projects, while students learning these concepts for the first time could work with the scaffolding provided over the quarter to create their own agent. For example, students created an AI agent that could provide a caption for a given image; detect pedestrians in video footage; and teach a computer to play a game like Blackjack.

Most machine learning courses in CSE are offered at the upper-division level, so most students come in with very different levels of exposure, said Eric Song, a UC San Diego computer science graduate student and teaching assistant for this Intro to AI course. "Our goal is to introduce these concepts earlier so that every student at least has some familiarity going in."

For the final project, students submitted a project report in the format of a conference paper. Bonjour said this was also meant to familiarize all students with how computer science and AI research papers are organized, since there is so much research happening in AI and ML right now that students may choose to contribute to in the future. This is practical training – reading dense PDFs with equations you barely understand is a rite of passage in AI research (and honestly, most of us still skim the abstracts first).

This Intro to AI course is being taught again in spring quarter for the remainder of the AI major students. It is being taught by Mia Minnes, a teaching professor of computer science, Vice Chair for Undergraduate Education within the UC San Diego Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and another lead faculty in the AI major.

According to the official CSE major documentation, the CS29 Artificial Intelligence major requires students to complete 12 units of AI Electives and 32 Units of Electives across theory, systems, and applications. Core topics include programming, data structures, algorithms, AI, machine learning, and data ethics. Upper-division coursework includes core Artificial Intelligence classes, specialized electives, and application-focused courses from CSE and other departments including Data Science, Cognitive Science, Mathematics, and Philosophy.

The program carries significant enrollment restrictions during its initial ramp-up phase. For the 2025-2026 academic year, only students admitted directly into the CS29 Artificial Intelligence major by UCSD's Admissions Office will be permitted to major in CS29 Artificial Intelligence. The CSE Department will not accept internal major switches into the Artificial Intelligence major in the 2025-2026 academic year. This policy for internal major changes will be revisited in 2026, and more information about internal major changes between CSE's four majors will be posted by Fall 2026.

Students admitted into CS29 Artificial Intelligence may switch into another CSE major without restriction. However, they will not be able to switch back into CS29 until this policy is revisited. CSE majors who are interested in studying Artificial Intelligence can use the "Focus Sheets" resource to select elective courses within the AI and machine learning subdisciplines.

The course structure reflects a deliberate pedagogical choice. Rather than rushing students into advanced neural network architectures, the curriculum builds from classical linear models through to modern language models. Students physically interact with the material – typing code, watching training loops progress, debugging model outputs that don't match expectations. This tactile engagement matters when you're trying to understand why your pedestrian detection model keeps flagging shadows as people.

Independent reporting from UC San Diego Today confirms the timeline and scope of the changes. The article details how the program emerged from over a decade of AI teaching and research growth on campus, positioning UC San Diego among the first UC campuses to offer a dedicated AI bachelor's degree.

Whether this structured approach produces better engineers than the current patchwork of upper-division electives remains to be seen. The real test comes when these students graduate and face hiring managers who want to know if they can actually build something that works in production, not just pass a final project.

Artūras Malašauskas is an AI Systems Integrator with 20+ years of production-grade web engineering experience. He has designed, shipped, and scaled enterprise Python/PHP systems for logistics, SaaS, and public-sector clients. For the past year, he has focused exclusively on AI integrations: deploying open-source LLMs, building generative media pipelines (image, audio, video), and engineering multi-agent workflows for real production environments. His standard: reproducibility, security, cost-efficient inference—no vaporware. He documents and evaluates emerging AI tooling, separating verified capabilities from marketing noise. Technical editor at: muza-ai.eu, ai-verslas.lt, ai-naujinos.lt Connect on LinkedIn