tl/dr: This is a copy of a one-off email I sent to all fast.ai forum users, with a long-overdue update. I had planned to send this email a year ago to let you know you could sign up for our new fast.ai course, “How to Solve it With Code”, but by the time I woke up the day after launching it, it was full. :O The good news is that we’ve spent the last year making it much better, and a brand new version is ready to go now. You can jump straight to it here: solve.it.com . It’s designed mainly for experienced coders, AI practitioners, and data scientists, although folks from nearly any technical field should find it helpful.
When Rachel & I started fast.ai, our mission was to democratize deep learning model training; to make it so you didn’t need a PhD as had been the case previously. It worked. :) Most folks I meet speaking at top academic conferences today are fast.ai alums. Our approach was very different to that of big companies, who focused on automating away developers, instead of supporting them.
Today, it’s even worse. Big companies are pushing approaches that dehumanize and automate work, and that’s already hurting people. I saw a great quote from CJ Reynolds today that captures the sad reality from the point of view of a coder:
I used to enjoy programming. Now, my days are typically spent going back and forth with an LLM and pretty often yelling at it… And part of enjoying programming for me was enjoying the little wins, right? You would work really hard to make something… or to figure something out. And once you figured it out, you’d have that little win. You’d get that dopamine hit and you’d feel good about yourself and you could keep going. I don’t get that when I’m using LLMs to write code. Once it’s figured something out, I don’t feel like I did any work to get there. And then I’m just mad that it’s doing the wrong thing. And then we go through this back and forth cycle and it’s not fun.
My mission remains making AI usable and helpful to everyone. To help people grow, succeed, and be happy. I do not want to create more “agentic AI” – I want humans to have agency, not computers!
To this end, I’ve been building on our fast.ai research and have figured out a new approach to creative activities such as software development and writing. I call it the “solveit method”. It’s designed to help you, as a person, harness AI to help you grow and learn in a way you can sustain over months and years. I’ve teamed up with my friend Eric Ries, whose Lean Startup ideas have been hugely influential to me, and we’ve now gotten the financial backing I need to bring this to life.
If you want to learn more, or try it out, head over here: solve.it.com
I’ve been using this approach for the last couple of years and it’s changed my life very much for the better. We also collected hundreds of testimonials from folks from last year’s preview course who told us much the same thing. Even people with 25 years coding experience said it’s changed how they think.
Exactly like with fast.ai’s foundational deep learning work, the result is in four parts:
- A course, How to Solve it With Code, in which we show how to solve coding problems, write prose, build web apps, use AI models, and much more, using the solveit method
- A software platform designed to make our approach more accessible and effective
- A thriving and supportive community which all course participants get access to. (I’ve also just created a new public forum channel and public discord channel, although these are mainly for folks to ask questions before signing up.)
- Ongoing R&D, which we publish on our sibling site Answer.AI.
I’ll be posting announcements to the forum Announcements channel; if you’d rather not receive them just turn off “watching” the channel (the bell in the top right blue with an exclamation mark when you’re watching). Some upcoming articles I’ll be posting include:
- A fascinating interview with Chris Latter about how he’s built multiple world-changing software projects that are still relevant after decades – and about how he sees AI fitting into the craft of software development
- An article about how tokenizers work and how to create your own, based on Andrej Karpathy’s excellent video
- A “meta-article” about how we created the above tokenizers article using the solveit approach and platform.
I’d love for you to join me in my new course. If you’re not sure, try it and see – you can get an automated full refund any time until 2 weeks into the course (no forms or anything to fill out).
Hope to see you soon
Jeremy
PS: I composed this email and sent it using our Solveit platform! :) It’s really handy for stuff like this, where I had to bring in a csv using pandas, set up markdown email rendering, do batched sending, etc – I find I don’t use external specialised services much any more since I can just do everything in Solveit and ask the AI to help me understand anything I’m not sure about. (I didn’t use any AI to actually write the email, however, since I want to use my own brain and write what’s in my own heart using my own words…)
PPS: Even if you’re not interested in our latest work on Solveit et al, I’d love to hear from you how your post-fast.ai life has been going! I hope that your deep learning learning has taken you to great places.