fast.ai—Making neural nets uncool again

What analog and AI education both get wrong

Sinister variations on the positive state of flow

Experiments in reading with LLMs

Chronic boredom causes stress, disengagement, and poor well-being in adults. So why do we glorify it for children?

An overview of the features of the Solveit platform, which is designed to make exploration and iterative development easier and faster.

Chris Lattner on software craftsmanship and AI

A text and code version of Karpathy’s famous tokenizer video.

An email sent to all fast.ai forum users.

Introducing fasttransform, a Python library that makes data transformations reversible and extensible through the power of multiple dispatch.

A friendly introduction to Foundation Models for Computational Pathology

fast.ai is joining Answer.AI, and we’re announcing a new kind of educational experience, ‘How To Solve It With Code’

Pundits say my husband and I are parenting wrong.

Answer.AI is a new kind of AI R&D lab which creates practical end-user products based on foundational research breakthroughs.

We’ve noticed an unusual training pattern in fine-tuning LLMs. At first we thought it’s a bug, but now we think it shows LLMs can learn effectively from a single example.

Moving AI ethics beyond explainability and fairness to justice

Model licensing & surveillance will likely be counterproductive by concentrating power in unsustainable ways

The history of technology suggests that the greatest risks come not from the tech, but from the people who control it

Mojo is a new programming language, based on Python, which fixes Python’s performance and deployment problems.

We’ve released our new course with over 30 hours of video content.

Language is a source of limitation and liberation. GPT 4 pushes this idea to the extreme by giving us access to unlimited language.

Last year, I became captivated by a new topic in a way that I hadn’t felt since I first discovered machine learning

4 videos from Practical Deep Learning for Coders Part 2, 2022 have been released as a special early preview of the new course.

Signups are now open for Practical Deep Learning for Coders Part 2, 2022. Scholarships are available for fast.ai community contributors, open source developers, and diversity scholars.

Practical Deep Learning for Coders part 2, 2022

Prior to 2020, we never expected to homeschool, and now we have committed to it long-term.

Previously, using git with Jupyter could create conflicts and break notebooks. With nbdev2, the problem has been totally solved.

Our favorite tool for software engineering productivity–nbdev, now re-written with Quarto

A complete from-scratch rewrite of fast.ai’s most popular course, that’s been 2 years in the making.

Notes taken whilst preparing a paper on mask efficacy from Nov to Jan 2022. My previous paper on this was written in April 2020 and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science

Following the thread of any seemingly quantitative issue in AI ethics (such as determining if software to rate loan applicants is racially biased or evaluating YouTube’s recommendation system) quickly leads to a host of qualitative questions. Unfortunately, there is often a large divide between computer scientists and social scientists, with over-simplified assumptions and fundamental misunderstandings of one another.

In the west, our ideas of harm are largely anchored to an individual being harmed by a particular action at a discrete moment in time. Yet the harms caused by algorithmic systems are often collective and communal.

Many cultural factors, misconceptions, stereotypes, and obstacles turn people off to math.

Lightning talks by Australian experts on a range of topics related to data science ethics, including machine learning in medicine, explainability, Indigenous-led AI, and the role of policy

While data for social good projects can be useful, there are also pitfalls to avoid.

Things can go disastrously wrong on data science and machine learning projects when we undervalue data work, use data in contexts that it wasn’t gathered for, or ignore the crucial role that humans play in the data science pipeline.

All approved SARS-CoV-2 vaccines provide far more benefits than risks. The very rare risk of VITT from the AZ and JJ vaccines is not due to the spike proteins, but is most likely due to details of their formulation.

Statistical tests need to be paired with proper data and study design to yield valid results. A recent review paper on Long Covid in children provides a useful example of how researchers can get this wrong. We use causal diagrams to decompose the problem and illustrate where errors were made.

From covid-19 to HIV research to the long history of wrongly assuming women’s illnesses are psychosomatic, we have seen again and again that medicine, like all science, is political.

Letter to the editor of the New Yorker on the irresponsible description of a suicide, undisclosed financial conflicts of interest, and omission of relevant medical research and historical context in their recent long covid article

By using better masks, monitoring and improving indoor air quality, and rolling out rapid tests, we could quickly halt the current outbreaks in the Australian states of New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria. If we fail to do so, and open up before 80% of all Australians are vaccinated, we may have tens of thousands of deaths, and hundreds of thousands of children with chronic illness which could last for years.

I made a playlist of 11 short videos (most are 6-13 mins long) on Ethics in Machine Learning. This is from my ethics lecture in Practical Deep Learning for Coders v4. I thought these short videos would be easier to watch, share, or…

The term “Artificial Intelligence” is a broad umbrella, referring to a variety of techniques applied to a range of tasks. This breadth can breed confusion. Success in using…

Abstract: fastai is a deep learning library which provides practitioners with high-level components that can quickly and easily provide state-of-the-art results in standard deep learning…

Summary: Today we’re launching fastdownload, a new library that makes it easy for your users to download, verify, and extract archives.

GitHub Copilot is a new service from GitHub and OpenAI, described as “Your AI pair programmer”. It is a plugin to Visual Studio Code which auto-generates code for you based on the contents of the…

Summary: today we’re announcing fastchan, a new conda mini-distribution with a focus on the PyTorch ecosystem. Using fastchan, installation and updates of libraries such as PyTo…

I’ve just returned to Australia to live, after a decade as an entrepreneur in San Francisco. For my first in-person talk in Australia, I shared my thoughts on how to build a…

Update Oct 30, 2020: NumFOCUS has apologized to me. I accept their apology. I do not accept their assertion that “At the time of the interview, the committee had not determined that there was a violation of the code…

You can use filters in your mask, your home central air, and your fans to clean the air in your home.

We’re releasing Practical Deep Learning for Coders (2020), fastai v2, fastcore, and fastgpu.

To celebrate the release of fast.ai’s new course, book, and software libraries on August 21st, we’re making available the foreword that Soumith Chintala (the co-creator of PyTorch) wrote for the book

Free, online course from fast.ai and University of San Francisco Data Institute covering disinformation, bias & fairness, ethical foundations, practical tools, privacy & surveillance, the silicon valley ecosystem, and algorithmic colonialism.

You can permanently damage your back, neck, and wrists from working without an ergonomic setup. Learn how to create one for less at home.

DIY masks aren’t just for protecting those around you. They can protect you too, but material and fit matters a lot. Learn what works, based on the latest research.

SARS-CoV-2 does not float in the air. It’s expelled as large droplets, which are easily caught by a cloth mask.

The University of San Francisco Center for Applied Data Ethics welcomes its first cohort of research fellows.

Wearing a mask decreases the number of people infected by an infectious wearer, because it reduces by around 99% the number of droplets that are ejected during speech

Most scientific evidence points in the same direction: keep your droplets to yourself - wear a mask

At the CADE Tech Policy Workshop, members of local government, activists, researchers, and those in industry shared prespectives on how to understand the uses, risks, and opporutnities around government use of technology.

An initiative from STEM teachers in Hong Kong to make reusable masks, for the community, by the community

We are data scientists—that is, our job is to understand how to analyze and interpret data. When we analyze the data around…

At the CADE Tech Policy Workshop, experts Renee DiResta and Guillaume Chaslot spoke on disinformation, including the dyanmics that cause it to go viral and attempts towards addressing it.

At the CADE Tech Policy Workshop, Y-Vonne Hutchinson spoke about the role of tech in facilitating mass atrocity, and Catherine Bracy spoke on the need for empathy and collective action.

As governments consider new uses of technology, in public places, this raises issues around surveillance of vulnerable populations, unintended consequences, and potential misuse. There are several principles to keep in mind in how these decisions can be made in a healthier and more responsible manner.

With Jupyter Notebooks and fast_template, we can easily share prose, code, tables, charts, and more!

Overview of 4 part series explaining how to host your own blog without any coding

We show how to use fast_template’s special ‘screenshot’ feature to get high-resolution screenshots

With GitHub Pages you can synchronize your blog with your computer, and write posts with MS Word or Google Docs

An easy and free approach to using an entirely browser-based interface for all your blogging needs

Pretrain a model using labels that are naturally part of the input data, instead of using external labels

There’s a lot more to creating useful data projects than just training an accurate model

nbdev is a Python programming environment which allows you to create complete python packages, including tests and a rich documentation system, all in Jupyter Notebooks

Three months after the launch of CADE, find out what we’ve been up to and how you can get involved.

Unthinkingly optimizing metrics can lead to a variety of grave harms, and what most current AI approaches do is to optimize metrics.

8 important truths about surveillance

Fixing the delegation program using delegates decorator and GetAttr

University of San Francisco is launching a Center of Applied Data Ethics, and Rachel Thomas is the director of the new center.

fast.ai’s newest course is Code-First Intro to NLP. It covers a blend of traditional NLP techniques, recent deep learning approaches, and urgent ethical issues.

Today we are releasing a new course, Deep Learning from the Foundations, which shows how to build a state of the art deep learning model from scratch.

For creating presentations there’s a lot of features in PowerPoint that are hard to beat. So it’s not surprising that it’s a very popular tool—I see a lot of folks…

YouTube has played a significant role in radicalizing people into conspiracy theories that promote white supremacy, anti-vaxxing, denial of mass shootings, c…

A blog is like a resume, only…

We presented this work at the Facebook f8 conference. You can see this video of our talk here, or read on for more details and examples.

This post is part 3 in a series. Please check out part 1 here and part 2 here.

This post is part 2 in a 3-part series. Please check out part 1 and part 3 as well.

This post is part 1 in a 3-part series. Please check out part 2 and part 3 as well.

Note from Jeremy: If you want to…

Note from Rachel: Although I’m excited about the positive potential of tech, I’m also scared about the ways that tech is having a negative impact on society, and I’m interested in how we can push tech companies to do…

Many people incorrectly assume that AI is only for an elite few– a handful of Silicon Valley computer science prodigies with monthly budgets larger than most people’s…

There’s been a lot of discussion in the last couple of days about OpenAI’s new language model. OpenAI made the unusual decision to not release their trained model (the AI community is usually extremely open about sharing them). On the whole, the reaction has been…

This is part 1 of a series on fastec2. To learn how to run and monitor long-running tasks with fastec2 check out part 2.

This is part 2 of a series on fastec2. For an introduction to fastec2, see part 1.

AI is being increasingly used to make important decisions. Many AI experts (including Jeff Dean, head of AI at Google, and Andrew Ng, founder of Coursera and deeplearning.ai) say that warnings about sentient robots are overblown, but other harms are not getting enough…

This post was originally published on 2018-08-16, but has been updated for the newest, upcoming course.

Launching today, the 2019 edition of Practical Deep Learning for Coders, the third iteration of the course, is 100% new material, including applications that have never been covered by an introductory deep learning course before (with some…

Generating numbers from random distributions is a practically useful tool that any coder is likely to need at some point. C++11 added a rich set of random distribution…

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on building some numeric programming libraries for Swift. But wait, isn’t Swift just what iOS programmers use for building…

My resolution for 2018 was to get into deep learning. I had stumbled upon a website called fast.ai in October 2017 after reading an article from the New York Times…

In machine learning and deep learning we can’t do anything without data. So the people that create datasets for us to train our models are the (often under-appreciated)…

Note from Jeremy: Want to learn more? Listen to me discuss fastai with Sam Charrington in this in-depth interview.

Today we’re launching our newest (and biggest!) course, Introduction to Machine Learning for Coders. The course, recorded at the University of San Francisco as part of the Masters of Science in Data…

My newest Ask-A-Data-Scientist post was inspired by a computer science student who wrote in asking for advice on how to pursue a…

My newest Ask-A-Data-Scientist post addresses the question of whether to pursue a PhD. You can find my previous Ask-A-Data-Scientist advice columns here.

At fast.ai, we want to do…

This post extends the work described in a previous post, Training Imagenet in 3 hours for $25; and CIFAR10 for $0.26.

The Harvard Business Review recently published an article, Want Less-Biased Decisions? Use Algorithms. by Alex P. Miller. The article focuses on the fact that humans make very biased…

This is part 3 in a series. Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here.

This is part 2 in a series. Check out part 1 here and part 3 here.

This post is part 1 of a series. Part 2 is an opinionated introduction to AutoML and neural architecture search, and Part 3 looks at Google’s AutoML in particular.

Note from Jeremy: Welcome to fast.ai’s first scholar-in-residence, Sylvain Gugger. What better way to introduce him than to publish the results of his first research project at fast.ai. We’ll be using the results of this research to change how we train…

Today we are launching the 2018 edition of Cutting Edge Deep Learning for Coders, part 2 of fast.ai’s free deep learning course. Just as with our part 1 Practical…

Posted: May 2, 2018

There is a powerful technique that is winning Kaggle competitions and is widely used at Google (according to Jeff Dean), Pinterest, and Instacart, yet that many people…

While many news outlets have covered what Zuckerberg wore for his testimony before congress last week, I wish that several more substantial issues were getting greater coverage, such as the lackluster response of Facebook to its…

I recently was a guest speaker at the Stanford AI Salon on the topic of accessiblity in AI, which included a…

We keep hearing that data scientist is the…

Last year we announced that we were developing a new deep learning course based on Pytorch (and a new library we have…

From the time of our very first deep learning course at the USF Data Institute (which was recorded and formed the basis of our MOOC), we have allowed selected students that could not participate in person…

Dawit Haile fought against the odds when he decided to study computer science in Eritrea, East Africa, despite having no internet connectivity. His perseverance paid off, first landing a job with the Eritrean government department of education, and later as an…

This post was inspired by a round-table discussion I led on the topics of founding start-ups and personal branding at the Women in Machine Learning Workshop, co-located with deep…

Cutting Edge Deep Learning for Coders (Part 2) will be taught this spring at the USF Data Institute in downtown San Francisco, on…

As a child, I was nerdy and shy. At my elementary and middle schools, we had to present our science…

This post has been translated into Chinese here.

An all-too-common scenario: a seemingly impressive machine learning model…

What we’re talking about is a cataclysmic change… What we’re talking about is a major foreign power with sophistication and ability to involve…

There is a lot of misleading and even false…

This post has been translated into Chinese here.

The next fast.ai courses will be based nearly entirely on a new framework we have developed, built on Pytorch. Pytorch is a different kind of deep learning library (dynamic, rather than static), which has been adopted by…

This post is from 2017. To apply for the 2018 version, please read this post

Edit one day later……

This week’s Ask-A-Data-Scientist column is from a medical doctor. Email your data science advice questions to mailto:[email protected]. Previous posts include:

Last year’s diversity fellowships (funded by University of San Francisco and fast.ai), open to women, people of Color, LGBTQ people, and vets, played a role in helping us create a diverse community.…

Deep learning…

At fast.ai, we want to do…

Special note: we’re teaching a fully updated part 1, in person, for seven weeks from Oct 30, 2017, at the USF Data Institute. See the course page fo…

“So how is fast.ai different from OpenAI?”…

I am thrilled to release fast.ai’s newest free course, Computational Linear Algebra, including an online textbook and a series of videos, and covering applications (using Python) such as how to identify the foreground in a surveillance video, how to categorize documents, the algorithm powering Google’s…

This week’s Ask-A-Data-Scientist column is from a parent on how to encourage their child in STEAM. Please email your data science related quandaries to mailto:[email protected]. Previous posts…

This post has been translated into Chinese here.

This week’s Ask-A-Data-Scientist column answers two short questions from students. Please email your data science related quandaries to mailto:[email protected]. Note that questions are edited for clarity and brevity.…

This post has been translated into Chinese here.

This post has been translated into Chinese here.

Recent American news events range from horrifying to dystopian, but reading the applications of our fast.ai international fellows brought me joy and optimism. I was blown away by how many bright, creative, resourceful folks from all over the world are applying deep learning to tackle a variety of…

We’ve been so excited to watch the thousands of people working their way through part 1 of Practical Deep Learning For Coders, and the…

Applications are now open for Deep Learning Part 2, to be offered at the University of San Francisco Data Institute on Monday evenings, Feb 27-April 10. The course will cover integrating multiple cutting-edge deep learning techniques, as well as combining classic machine learning techniques with deep…

With part 2 of our in person SF course starting in 6 weeks, and…

Buried in a Reddit comment, Francois Chollet, author of Keras and AI researcher at Google, made an exciting announcement: Keras will be the first high-level library added to core TensorFlow at Google, which will effectively make it TensorFlow’s default…

An interesting thread came up over at Hacker News: Ask HN: Where is AI/ML actually adding value at your company?. And the folks at High Scalability were good enough to summarize…

We’re very excited and proud to announce the launch of the fast.ai Deep Learning MOOC. It contains all the lessons from the in-person course we’ve been discussing here over the last few months, along with extra online material to help students understand the…

Huge thanks to Boyd Mcgeachie from AWS for reaching out to us and organizing a (nearly) frictionless AWS onboarding experience for our MOOC participants. He couldn’t have…

This was inspired by a bright high school student that emailed me for advice about his interest in deep learning.

I sometimes receive emails…

At the Financial Times-Nikkei conference on The Future of AI, Robots, and Us a few weeks ago, Andreessen…

We have been getting a lot of interest in our upcoming deep learning course over the last couple of days. With applications closing today…

I’ve…

Update: The deadline has been extended to 10/17. Read more here

For those of you considering joining our deep…

Paul Lockhart, a Columbia math PhD, former Brown professor, and K-12 math teacher, writes in the influential essay A Mathematician’s Lament of a nightmare world where children are not allowed to listen to or play music until they have spent over a decade mastering music notation and theory, spending classes…

If you’re considering investing time in studying deep learning with fast.ai, then we want to…

Update: The deadline has been extended to 10/17

Jeremy is the past president of Kaggle, founder of Enlitic, FastMail.FM, and Optimal Decisions Group, and is on the faculty at Singularity University. See fast.ai’s About page for a brief…