Fast.ai

Overview

Fast.ai is a non-profit organization founded by Jeremy Howard and Rachel Thomas, focused on deep learning education and research with the explicit mission to make AI accessible to everyone. They provide high-quality, practical online courses that teach students how to train state-of-the-art deep learning models with minimal prerequisites, emphasizing a code-first, 'top-down' approach to learning.

Complementing their educational efforts, fast.ai develops and maintains the `fastai` library, an open-source deep learning library built on top of PyTorch. The library is designed to be highly user-friendly for practitioners to build and deploy models quickly, while also providing the flexibility and depth needed for researchers. Its philosophy is to simplify common deep learning tasks and incorporate best practices from cutting-edge research directly into its API, lowering the barrier to entry and accelerating development for a wide range of applications.

Key Features

• Free and accessible online deep learning courses
• Practical, code-first teaching methodology
• Open-source `fastai` library built on PyTorch
• Library designed for ease of use and rapid prototyping
• Supports computer vision, natural language processing, tabular data, and recommendation systems
• Incorporates best practices and state-of-the-art techniques
• Strong community support via forums and documentation
• Emphasis on empowering practitioners to achieve world-class results

Supported Platforms

• Web Browser (for courses and documentation)
• Python Environments (compatible with Linux, Windows, macOS running Python/PyTorch)

Integrations

• PyTorch (core foundation)
• Standard Python libraries (NumPy, Pandas, scikit-learn, etc.)