fast.ai

What fast.ai is

fast.ai offers free deep learning courses, a software library, research, and a community focused on making deep learning more accessible. Its Practical Deep Learning for Coders course covers computer vision, natural language processing, tabular analysis, collaborative filtering, random forests, regression, and model deployment. Part 1 has nine lessons of around 90 minutes each, and a linked Part 2 video course is described as over 30 hours. Learners should know how to code, preferably in Python, and have followed a high school math course. The course uses PyTorch, fastai, Hugging Face Transformers, and Gradio. It recommends Kaggle Notebooks and Paperspace Gradient, with some work done on the learner’s own laptop. The fastai library provides high-level tools for practical deep learning alongside lower-level components researchers can combine. It can be used in Google Colab without installation or installed locally with pip. Documentation lists a GPU-optimized computer vision library, an optimizer, callbacks, and a data block API. Windows Jupyter resets DataLoader num_workers to 0 to avoid hangs, which can slow some computer vision tasks compared with Linux. Learners needing help are directed to the fast.ai community forum.