Actually, Thrun's AI course, Ng's ML course, and Widom's Databases course were announced and ran pretty much simultaneously. They were all successful, but only Thrun decided to split off because of it.
https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning
Is it still a good introduction to machine learning? It's several years old now. Are there better courses available?
So yes, it is a good intro to machine learning. There are new advances coming up all the time. But you will definitely need to know most of the topics in that course. That is, if you want to properly understand most of the latest techniques.
Someone even made a drinking game out of it: https://www.reddit.com/r/mlclass/comments/lvxuz/mlclass_drin...
The only(?) real criticism of it is the reliance on Matlab/Octave.
The only problem is that modern applied ML is dominated by Python...
I don't work with machine learning and AI, but I used to do a lot of server-side programming with dynamic language. Switching to golang has been great. I'm far more productive with it and the CPU and memory savings have been great. Isn't ML the kind of domain where CPU cycles and memory matter?