About

About fast.ai

Deep learning is transforming the world. We are making deep learning easier to use and getting more people from all backgrounds involved through our:

About our slogan

The world needs everyone involved with AI, no matter how unlikely your background.

Being cool is about being exclusive, and that’s the opposite of what we want. We want to make deep learning as accessible as possible– including to people using uncool languages like C#, uncool operating systems like Windows (which is used by the majority of the world), uncool datasets (way smaller than anything at Google, and in domain areas you’d consider obscure), and with uncool backgrounds (maybe you didn’t go to Stanford).

fast.ai in the news

About the team

Jeremy Howard

Jeremy Howard

Jeremy Howard is a data scientist, researcher, developer, educator, and entrepreneur. He created ULMFiT, the AI system at the heart of all of today’s major language models, including ChatGPT and Google Gemini. Jeremy is the founding CEO of Answer.AI, a new kind of AI R&D lab which creates practical end-user products based on foundational research breakthroughs. He is also the co-founder of fast.ai, a research institute dedicated to making deep learning more accessible, an Honorary Professor at the University of Queensland, and a Digital Fellow at Stanford University. Previously, Jeremy was a Distinguished Research Scientist at the University of San Francisco, where he was the founding chair of the Wicklow Artificial Intelligence in Medical Research Initiative.

Jeremy is a co-founder of the global Masks4All movement, including leading the largest evidence review of masks, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, and becoming the most read paper of all time on preprints.org. He wrote the first article to push for public mask use in the English-speaking work, in the Washington Post, along with articles in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Conversation, and the Sydney Morning Herald, and he appeared on most of the major national US TV channels, including Good Morning America and Nightline.

He co-authored the book Deep Learning for Coders with Fastai and PyTorch, which has 5 stars on Amazon. Google’s Director of Research, Peter Norvig, said “This is one of the best sources for a programmer to become proficient in deep learning.” The book is based on Jeremy’s free online course, which is the world’s longest-running course on AI and deep learning. He also created the fastai software library, one of the world’s most popular deep learning frameworks.

Jeremy was the founding CEO of Enlitic, which was the first company to apply deep learning to medicine, and was selected as one of the world’s top 50 smartest companies by MIT Tech Review two years running. He was the President and Chief Scientist of the data science platform Kaggle, where he was the top ranked participant in international machine learning competitions 2 years running. He was the founding CEO of two successful Australian startups (FastMail, and Optimal Decisions Group–purchased by Lexis-Nexis). Before that, he spent 8 years in management consulting, at McKinsey & Co, and AT Kearney. Jeremy has invested in, mentored, and advised many startups, and contributed to many open source projects. His talk on TED.com, “The wonderful and terrifying implications of computers that can learn”, has over 2.5 million views.

Rachel Thomas

Rachel Thomas.
Photo by Gabriela Hasbun

Dr Rachel Thomas is a professor of practice at Queensland University of Technology and co-founder of fast.ai, which has been featured in The Economist, MIT Tech Review, and Forbes. She was the founding director of the USF Center for Applied Data Ethics, and was selected by Forbes as one of 20 Incredible Women in AI. Dr Thomas earned her math PhD at Duke, and was an early engineer at Uber.

Her writing has been read by over a million people; has been translated into Chinese, Spanish, Korean, & Portuguese; and has made the front page of Hacker News 9x. Some of her most popular articles include:

Rachel’s talks include: