fast.ai
Headquarters
San Francisco, CAFounded
2016CEO / Founder
Jeremy HowardEmployees
1-10Funding
BootstrappedProducts
1 product listedAvg. AI Score
8.2/10Website
www.fast.ai
Profile updated
About fast.ai
fast.ai was founded in 2016 by Jeremy Howard and Rachel Thomas to make deep learning more accessible to practitioners and researchers outside elite academic settings. The institute publishes free "Practical Deep Learning for Coders" and "From Deep Learning Foundations to Stable Diffusion" courses, taught annually and watched by hundreds of thousands of learners.
The fastai library is a PyTorch wrapper providing high-level APIs for vision, text, tabular, and collaborative-filtering models, used in production and in academic research. The associated nbdev tool builds Python libraries from Jupyter notebooks.
fast.ai operates as a small non-profit team led by Jeremy Howard, with research output published as papers, library releases, and open course material rather than commercial products.
Financials
Dated, source-cited figures. Estimates are marked.
Products by fast.ai
All products by fast.ai reviewed by our AI panel of experts.
How Our Review Panel Scores fast.ai
Six independent reviewer personalities assessed fast.ai's product on their own terms. They landed within 0.4 points of each other, an unusually strong consensus.
Averaged across 1 reviewed product in our catalog. Scores are out of 10.
Competitive Landscape
Who fast.ai competes with, and how they differ.
Kaggle is a commercial (Google-owned) platform combining datasets, competitions, and free notebook compute, whereas fast.ai is a non-profit focused solely on producing free educational courses and an open-source deep learning library rather than hosting a community platform or compute infrastructure.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
H2O.ai sells enterprise-grade automated machine learning and MLOps software with commercial support, targeting business data science teams, while fast.ai is a free, education-first research institute with no paid product or enterprise offering.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
Dataiku is a paid, low-code enterprise data science and analytics platform aimed at business analysts and enterprise IT, contrasting with fast.ai's free, code-first deep learning curriculum aimed at individual practitioners and students.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
DeepLearning.AI, founded by Andrew Ng, is a for-profit education company selling structured courses and specializations (often via Coursera), competing directly with fast.ai's free top-down, code-first deep learning curriculum.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
Hugging Face is a well-funded company offering a model hub, transformers library, and paid inference/hosting infrastructure, overlapping with fast.ai's open-source PyTorch tooling but with a much broader commercial ecosystem and business model.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewedCompany Timeline
Key milestones in fast.ai's history, with sources.
- Milestone
fast.ai joins Answer.AI
fast.ai joined the AI R&D lab Answer.AI, guaranteeing its future with new courses and software; the announcement coincided with a new "How to Solve It With Code" course beta.
getcoai.com - Launch
fastai v2, fastcore, fastgpu and new course/book released
fast.ai released a from-scratch rewrite of its deep-learning library (fastai v2) alongside fastcore, fastgpu, a new "Practical Deep Learning for Coders" course, and a 600+ page book — described by Jeremy Howard as the lab's biggest release day in its four-year history.
fast.ai - Launch
fastai v1.0 released
fast.ai released version 1.0 of its fastai deep-learning library built on PyTorch, timed to launch alongside PyTorch 1.0; it won every category of Stanford's DAWNBench training-speed competition.
venturebeat.com - Milestone
ULMFiT paper published
Jeremy Howard and Sebastian Ruder submitted "Universal Language Model Fine-tuning for Text Classification" (ULMFiT) to arXiv, a transfer-learning technique for NLP later presented at ACL 2018.
arxiv.org - Founded
fast.ai founded by Jeremy Howard and Rachel Thomas
Jeremy Howard and Rachel Thomas launched fast.ai as a research lab dedicated to democratizing deep learning by making it accessible to domain experts rather than a small group of specialists.
fast.ai
Explore AI Software Reviews
Browse multi-perspective AI panel reviews across hundreds of AI tools, agents, and platforms. Find the right software with insights from CTO, Developer, Marketer, Finance, and User perspectives.