Jeremy Howard

FAST.AI: DEEP LEARNING FOR PEOPLE WHO AREN'T GOOGLE

Howard's stubborn idea: deep learning should be usable by ordinary programmers, not just Google. fast.ai made that real, ULMFiT helped establish fine-tuning for language, and Answer.AI keeps pushing applied AI outside the giant labs.

1. 1999

   HE STARTS FASTMAIL BEFORE DATA SCIENCE HAS A NAME

   Howard says he started FastMail in 1999, beginning a startup career years before he became known for machine learning.

   SOURCES: Jeremy Howardfirst-party

2. Feb 2011

   KAGGLE TURNS A SELF-TAUGHT COMPETITOR INTO ITS PRESIDENT

   After competing successfully on Kaggle, Howard joined the company as president and chief scientist, moving from startup operator into competitive machine learning full time.

   SOURCES: Wiredreported · fast.aifirst-party

3. 2014

   HE MOVES DEEP LEARNING INTO MEDICINE

   Howard became founding CEO of Enlitic, applying deep learning to medical imaging before leaving the company and turning to fast.ai.

   SOURCES: fast.aifirst-party

4. Oct 7, 2016

   HE QUITS THE CEO JOB AND STARTS TEACHING DEEP LEARNING

   After leading Enlitic and earlier serving as president and chief scientist of Kaggle, Howard launched fast.ai with Rachel Thomas to make deep learning more accessible.

   SOURCES: fast.aifirst-party

5. Jan 17, 2017

   THE COURSE PUSHES CODERS TOWARD THE RESEARCH FRONTIER

   fast.ai expanded Practical Deep Learning for Coders with a second course focused on implementing recent research and production-grade systems.

   SOURCES: fast.aifirst-party

6. Sep 8, 2017

   FAST.AI MOVES ITS STACK TO PYTORCH

   Howard announced that future fast.ai courses would be built largely around PyTorch and a higher-level library the team had created on top of it.

   SOURCES: fast.aifirst-party

7. May 15, 2018

   ULMFIT MAKES TRANSFER LEARNING WORK FOR LANGUAGE

   Howard and Sebastian Ruder introduced ULMFiT, a transfer-learning method that helped establish fine-tuning as a powerful approach for natural-language tasks.

   SOURCES: fast.aifirst-party

8. 2020

   THE COURSE BECOMES A BOOK-AND-CODE SYSTEM

   fast.ai released a new Practical Deep Learning for Coders course alongside a freely accessible notebook-based book and updated software stack.

   SOURCES: fast.aifirst-party

9. Dec 12, 2023

   TEN MILLION DOLLARS FOR A SMALL APPLIED-AI LAB

   Howard announced Answer.AI, a new research-and-development lab backed by a $10 million investment and focused on making AI useful to more people.

   SOURCES: fast.aifirst-party