fast.ai—Making neural nets uncool again

Courses: How to Solve it With Code; Practical Deep Learning for Coders
Software: fastai for PyTorch; nbdev
Book: Practical Deep Learning for Coders with fastai and PyTorch
In the news: The Economist; The New York Times; MIT Tech Review

Blog

Breaking the Spell of Vibe Coding

ai-in-society

technical

Sinister variations on the positive state of flow

Jan 28, 2026

Rachel Thomas

How To Use AI for the Ancient Art of Close Reading

education

technical

Experiments in reading with LLMs

Jan 21, 2026

Rachel Thomas

Stop Saying Boredom is Good for Kids

education

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

Dec 3, 2025

Rachel Thomas

A Guide to Solveit Features

technical

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

Nov 7, 2025

Solveit and Kerem Turgutlu

Build to Last

advice

technical

Chris Lattner on software craftsmanship and AI

Oct 30, 2025

Jeremy Howard

Let’s Build the GPT Tokenizer: A Complete Guide to Tokenization in LLMs

technical

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

Oct 16, 2025

Andrej Karpathy, via Solveit and Kerem Turgutlu

How to Solve it With Code course now available

courses

An email sent to all fast.ai forum users.

Oct 15, 2025

Jeremy Howard

fasttransform: Reversible Pipelines Made Simple

technical

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

Feb 20, 2025

Rens Dimmendaal, Hamel Husain, & Jeremy Howard

What AI can tell us about microscope slides

health

technical

A friendly introduction to Foundation Models for Computational Pathology

Feb 3, 2025

Rachel Thomas

A New Chapter for fast.ai: How To Solve It With Code

education

courses

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

Nov 7, 2024

Jeremy Howard

In defense of screen time

education

Pundits say my husband and I are parenting wrong.

Oct 29, 2024

Rachel Thomas

A new old kind of R&D lab

ai-in-society

technical

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

Dec 12, 2023

Jeremy Howard

Can LLMs learn from a single example?

technical

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.

Sep 4, 2023

Jeremy Howard and Jonathan Whitaker

The real risk of AI is how it concentrates power

ai-in-society

Moving AI ethics beyond explainability and fairness to justice

Jul 29, 2023

Rachel Thomas

AI Safety and the Age of Dislightenment

ai-in-society

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

Jul 10, 2023

Jeremy Howard

Is Avoiding Extinction from AI Really an Urgent Priority?

ai-in-society

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

May 30, 2023

Seth Lazar, Jeremy Howard, & Arvind Narayanan

Mojo may be the biggest programming language advance in decades

technical

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

May 4, 2023

Jeremy Howard

From Deep Learning Foundations to Stable Diffusion

courses

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

Apr 4, 2023

Jeremy Howard

GPT 4 and the Uncharted Territories of Language

ai-in-society

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

Mar 20, 2023

Jeremy Howard

I was an AI researcher. Now, I am an immunology student.

education

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

Feb 7, 2023

Rachel Thomas

1st Two Lessons of From Deep Learning Foundations to Stable Diffusion

courses

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

Oct 19, 2022

Jeremy Howard

Deep Learning Foundations Signup, Open Source Scholarships, & More

courses

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.

Sep 23, 2022

Jeremy Howard

From Deep Learning Foundations to Stable Diffusion

courses

Practical Deep Learning for Coders part 2, 2022

Sep 16, 2022

Jeremy Howard

My family’s unlikely homeschooling journey

education

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

Sep 6, 2022

Rachel Thomas

The Jupyter+git problem is now solved

technical

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

Aug 25, 2022

Jeremy Howard

nbdev+Quarto: A new secret weapon for productivity

technical

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

Jul 28, 2022

Hamel Husain and Jeremy Howard

Practical Deep Learning for Coders 2022

courses

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

Jul 21, 2022

Jeremy Howard

Masks for COVID: Updating the evidence

health

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

Jul 4, 2022

Jeremy Howard

Qualitative humanities research is crucial to AI

ai-in-society

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.

Jun 1, 2022

Louisa Bartolo and Rachel Thomas

AI Harms are Societal, Not Just Individual

ai-in-society

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.

May 17, 2022

Rachel Thomas and Louisa Bartolo

There’s no such thing as not a math person

advice

education

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

Mar 15, 2022

Rachel Thomas

7 Great Lightning Talks Related to Data Science Ethics

ai-in-society

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

Mar 14, 2022

Rachel Thomas

Doing Data Science for Social Good, Responsibly

ai-in-society

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

Nov 23, 2021

Rachel Thomas

Avoiding Data Disasters

technical

ai-in-society

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.

Nov 4, 2021

Rachel Thomas

SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein Impairment of Endothelial Function Does Not Impact Vaccine Safety

health

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.

Oct 27, 2021

Jeremy Howard and Uri Manor

Statistical problems found when studying Long Covid in kids

health

technical

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.

Oct 17, 2021

Jeremy Howard

Medicine is Political

health

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.

Oct 12, 2021

Rachel Thomas

Inaccuracies, irresponsible coverage, and conflicts of interest in The New Yorker

health

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

Sep 25, 2021

Rachel Thomas

Australia can, and must, get R under 1.0

health

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.

Sep 3, 2021

Jeremy Howard

Getting Specific about AI Risks (an AI Taxonomy)

ai-in-society

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…

Aug 16, 2021

Rachel Thomas

11 Short Videos About AI Ethics

ai-in-society

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…

Aug 16, 2021

Rachel Thomas

fastai A Layered API for Deep Learning

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…

Aug 13, 2021

Jeremy Howard and Sylvain Gugger

fastdownload: the magic behind one of the famous 4 lines of code

technical

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

Aug 2, 2021

Jeremy Howard

Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

technical

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…

Jul 19, 2021

Jeremy Howard

fastchan, a new conda mini-distribution

technical

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 P…

Jul 15, 2021

Jeremy Howard

20 Years of Tech Startup Experiences in One Hour

ai-in-society

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…

May 26, 2021

Jeremy Howard

I violated a code of conduct

ai-in-society

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…

Oct 28, 2020

Jeremy Howard

Avoiding the smoke - how to breath clean air

advice

health

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

Sep 11, 2020

Jeremy Howard

fast.ai releases new deep learning course, four libraries, and 600-page book

courses

technical

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

Aug 21, 2020

Jeremy Howard

Forward from the ‘Deep Learning for Coders’ Book

courses

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

Aug 20, 2020

Soumith Chintala

Applied Data Ethics, a new free course, is essential for all working in tech

ai-in-society

courses

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.

Aug 19, 2020

Rachel Thomas

Essential Work-From-Home Advice: Cheap and Easy Ergonomic Setups

advice

health

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

Aug 6, 2020

Rachel Thomas

Cloth masks can protect the wearer

health

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.

Jul 10, 2020

Jeremy Howard

Particle sizes for mask filtration

health

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

Jun 26, 2020

Jeremy Howard

Introducing the first cohort of USF CADE Data Ethics Research Fellows

ai-in-society

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

Jun 16, 2020

Rachel Thomas

Masks - FAQ for Skeptics

health

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

Apr 20, 2020

Jeremy Howard

Masks for all? The science says yes.

health

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

Apr 13, 2020

Professor Trisha Greenhalgh OBE and Jeremy Howard

6 Important Videos about Tech, Ethics, Policy, and Government

ai-in-society

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.

Mar 31, 2020

Rachel Thomas

Saving The Mask

health

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

Mar 20, 2020

Sarada Lee

Covid-19, your community, and you - a data science perspective

health

We are data scientists—that is, our job is to understand how to analyze and interpret data. When we analyze the data around covid-19, we are very concerned. The most…

Mar 9, 2020

Jeremy Howard and Rachel Thomas

Disinformation: what it is, why it’s pervasive, and proposed regulations

ai-in-society

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.

Feb 26, 2020

Rachel Thomas

Tech Ethics Crisis: The Big Picture, and How We Got Here

ai-in-society

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.

Feb 9, 2020

Rachel Thomas

4 Principles for Responsible Government Use of Technology

ai-in-society

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.

Jan 21, 2020

Rachel Thomas

Blogging with Jupyter Notebooks

technical

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

Jan 20, 2020

Jeremy Howard

Your own blog with GitHub Pages and fast_template (4 part tutorial)

technical

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

Jan 20, 2020

Jeremy Howard

Blogging with screenshots

technical

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

Jan 19, 2020

Jeremy Howard

Syncing your blog with your PC, and using your word processor

technical

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

Jan 18, 2020

Jeremy Howard

Your own hosted blog, the easy, free, open way (even if you’re not a computer expert)

technical

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

Jan 16, 2020

Jeremy Howard

Self-supervised learning and computer vision

technical

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

Jan 13, 2020

Jeremy Howard

Data project checklist

technical

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

Jan 7, 2020

Jeremy Howard

nbdev: use Jupyter Notebooks for everything

technical

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

Dec 2, 2019

Jeremy Howard

Concerned about the impacts of data misuse? Ways to get involved with the USF Center for Applied Data Ethics

ai-in-society

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

Nov 4, 2019

Rachel Thomas

The problem with metrics is a big problem for AI

ai-in-society

technical

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

Sep 24, 2019

Rachel Thomas

8 Things You Need to Know about Surveillance

ai-in-society

8 important truths about surveillance

Aug 7, 2019

Rachel Thomas

Make Delegation Work in Python

Fixing the delegation program using delegates decorator and GetAttr

Aug 6, 2019

Jeremy Howard

USF Launches New Center of Applied Data Ethics

ai-in-society

courses

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

Aug 5, 2019

Rachel Thomas

new fast.ai course: A Code-First Introduction to Natural Language Processing

technical

courses

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.

Jul 8, 2019

Rachel Thomas

Deep Learning from the Foundations

courses

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.

Jun 28, 2019

Jeremy Howard