Here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zZZjaYl4AA

It seems like the Siraj saga is continuing this time with Siraj posting a video titled “My Apology”.

In the video, he doesn’t talk about plagiarising papers, rather his history of not crediting developers whose code he’s “re-uploaded”.

He briefly outlines his process:

what my practice has been… is I will spend all my time on github.com, which is where code lives – I love Github, and I’ll just be analyzing and looking for code that I think is cool and useful and then once I find some I’ll download it, re-upload it to my Github and then put the name of the author at the very bottom of the Github README. I’ll then make a YouTube video about that code to get more people interested in it, but inside the video itself I’ll be like “hey this is the code” I’ll be very ambiguous I won’t name the author and then sometimes – here’s the embarrassing part – sometimes I’ll literally say “this is my code”

as well as trying to justify his actions:

the reason I did that is selfishness and ego pretty much and I just convinced myself that it wasn’t that way because I was still doing good for other people

In the middle of the video, he speaks about how people who open-source code on Github are like family

I’m your promoter, I’m your, I’m the guy who is trying to uplift you because you’re the one who is actually doing the work. If you like to code and you share that code with people on github, to me you’re like family. To me, I like, I love you I would, I’m not you I ant to be you. But my whole job is to promote you

before reading a list of developers whose code he’s “re-uploaded”.

He then talks about wanting to be a person that promotes and uplifts developers instead of stealing credit

I’m gonna focus, moving forward I’m gonna focus on promoting other developers, crediting them in the video, uplifing other researchers and developers and having just a huge focus on that, rather than trying to be the guy, you know the king who’s the one who’s doing all of this stuff, you know.

Finally, he mentions that he’s not striving to be famous anymore

but now it’s like I don’t care about you know, being famous at all seriously, like obviously I don’t

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I had a hard time believing his apology, especially considering the ease with which he lied and the lengths he went to to ensure you couldn’t find the original author of the code (i.e. not clicking the fork button that links to the original repository). Hopefully nonetheless it results in more authors being credited.