fast.ai

What is fast.ai?

fast.ai is an educational organization and open-source project that aims to make deep learning accessible. It publishes free courses, including Practical Deep Learning for Coders, and software such as the fastai library built on PyTorch and nbdev.

Key capabilities of fast.ai

• Practical Deep Learning for Coders: flagship free course
• fastai library: high-level deep learning library built on PyTorch
• nbdev: builds Python packages entirely within Jupyter Notebooks
• Specialized courses: NLP, computational linear algebra and applied data ethics
• Published book: Practical Deep Learning for Coders with fastai and PyTorch
• fasttransform and fastdownload: smaller open-source tools

How fast.ai works

Learners follow the courses in Jupyter notebooks, using fastai to train models with a few lines of code on top of PyTorch. nbdev lets developers write, test and publish packages from notebooks. The organization was co-founded by Jeremy Howard and Rachel Thomas and has joined Answer.AI, a lab building practical products.

Who uses fast.ai?

Programmers, data scientists and students learning deep learning use the courses and library. Rachel Thomas has focused on AI ethics and education topics.

fast.ai pricing

The courses and libraries are free and open source. The book is sold through major retailers. There is no paid software plan listed on the site.

fast.ai alternatives

Alternatives for learning or deploying models include DeepInfra for hosted inference, fal for generative media inference, PaddlePaddle for an open-source deep learning framework, and Modular MAX for model serving.