fast.ai offers free deep learning courses, open-source software like fastai and nbdev, and a technical blog on AI research, founded by Jeremy Howard and Rachel Thomas.
About
fast.ai is a free educational and open-source software project focused on making deep learning accessible to people with coding experience but without advanced math backgrounds. It was co-founded by Jeremy Howard and Rachel Thomas, and its tagline, "Making neural nets uncool again," signals a deliberate emphasis on practical, widely usable machine learning over academic gatekeeping.
The project operates through three main channels. Its flagship course, Practical Deep Learning for Coders, teaches neural networks to programmers, with additional offerings such as How to Solve it With Code and From Deep Learning Foundations to Stable Diffusion, the latter containing over 30 hours of video. Its software includes the fastai library for PyTorch and nbdev, a notebook-driven development tool. Its blog, organized across categories like technical, education, and AI-in-society, covers research findings and commentary. In November 2024, fast.ai announced it was joining Answer.AI, a research-and-development lab led by Howard.
Key Features
Pricing & Fees
- Pricing: fast.ai's courses, software, and book are offered free of charge; the site's pages reviewed do not list any paid plans.
- Scholarships: fast.ai has offered open source scholarships for community contributors, open source developers, and diversity scholars in connection with its courses.
- Media coverage: fast.ai's work has been covered by The Economist, The New York Times, and MIT Technology Review.
- Open source: All software, including the fastai library and nbdev, is available on GitHub at github.com/fastai.
Who It's For
fast.ai is designed primarily for coders who want to learn deep learning without first completing years of formal math study. Typical users include software engineers entering machine learning, data scientists adopting PyTorch, self-directed learners, and researchers interested in the project's published findings on LLM training. The nbdev and fastai libraries also serve working developers who want notebook-based workflows or faster model development. Educators and writers on AI-in-society topics may find the blog's essays on AI policy, ethics, and education useful as reference material.
FAQ
What is fast.ai?fast.ai is a free educational project and open-source software publisher, co-founded by Jeremy Howard and Rachel Thomas, that teaches deep learning to programmers and maintains tools such as the fastai PyTorch library and nbdev.
Is fast.ai free to use?Yes, fast.ai's courses, book, and software are made available free of charge, and the project has additionally offered scholarships to community contributors and diversity scholars.
What software does fast.ai maintain?fast.ai maintains the fastai deep learning library for PyTorch, the nbdev notebook-driven development environment, and newer tools such as fasttransform; all are available on GitHub.
Is fast.ai affiliated with any other organization?Yes, in November 2024 fast.ai announced it was joining Answer.AI, an AI research-and-development lab founded by Jeremy Howard that builds practical products from foundational research.
Who writes the fast.ai blog?The blog is written primarily by co-founders Jeremy Howard and Rachel Thomas, along with occasional guest contributors such as Andrej Karpathy, Hamel Husain, and Jonathan Whitaker.
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