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Fastai: A Layered API for Deep Learning

arxiv.org

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Re: Fastai: A Layered API for Deep Learning

#2

Post by pama »

Jeremy is a fantastic teacher. The paper is written in his usual lucid style and mixes code with narrative in a seamless way. The paper feels like an extended version of one of his pedagogical jupyter notebooks.

Re: Fastai: A Layered API for Deep Learning

#6

Post by beefield »

My small complaint is that there seems to be no backwards compatibility whatsoever between fastai versions.

I get it that it is supposed to be working on the very bleeding edge of deep learning technologies, but at the same time it is sold as "practical". At least I would be slightly uncomfortable doing anything in production with a library that is all but guaranteed to get no (compatible) development love whatsoever after a couple of months when the developers have started working on the next version.

But I guess it may just be a too tough nut to crack to provide a bleeding edge deep learning library with production quality life cycle support.

Re: Fastai: A Layered API for Deep Learning

#7

Post by nnq »

Does it still have the requirement for a GPU (driver) to be around to even run, like fastai 1.0 had? (Had to manually comment requirements and imports to have it run CPU-only...)

I get it that for any serious use you'd want a GPU, but for learning and toying around you might want to be able to run and debug code on your freakin macbook! Is that too much to asks? (Some of us do code in IDEs, not in notebooks + vim on server, and we'd want at least our test suite to be able to run locally ffs!)

(Also, hopefully they've got rid of the lovecraftian architecture with methods that can mutate an object's class [?!] - I understood the practical appeal and why they did it, but as a software engineer with sympathy for functional-programming that almost made me wanna barf :|)

Anyway, fastai is awesome for learning and experimenting, keep up the good work! I just hate it that it's so obnoxious to use and learn for anyone with a more traditional software engineering background...

Re: Fastai: A Layered API for Deep Learning

#9

Post by sabertoothed »

giansegato wrote: post #5

Jeremy is probably one of the smartest people out there. The fact that he decided to allocate his time to teach and to build open source tools — that is: a selfless way to provide value to his community — is something rare & worth being acknowledged.

So true. And he cares about ethical behaviour as well (it appears from the outside where I am), in AI and work life.

Re: Fastai: A Layered API for Deep Learning

#10

Post by solarmist »

nnq wrote: post #7

Does it still have the requirement for a GPU (driver) to be around to even run, like fastai 1.0 had? (Had to manually comment requirements and imports to have it run CPU-only...) I get it that for any serious use you'd want a GPU, but for learning and toying around you might want to be able to run and debug code on your freakin macbook! Is that too much to asks? (Some of us do code in IDEs, not in notebooks + vim on…

I think the whole reason AI has become what it has is because these are “brute force” things you can’t do with a normal CPU. So functional programming and massively parallel algorithms are what make it possible.

Every year it gets more accessible to a wider audience. Soon there will probably be frameworks that hide the complexity completely and you can just say here’s a massive dataset, I want to train it to be a conversation bot or cat pic classifier, go. But we’re not quite there yet.

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