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Very well said. Edit: feel like I should clarify a bit to avoid the "me too +1" style comment. I've been torn in recent months between fast.ai's great hands on
by Macuyiko 8y ago
Very well said.
Edit: feel like I should clarify a bit to avoid the "me too +1" style comment. I've been torn in recent months between fast.ai's great hands on and to the point style of teaching (which I think is great and have strived to use as an example in my own courses) and their somewhat overhyped presentation of the fast.ai library. It's not bad, but ultimately a collection of rather hacky function calls that are build on top of other frameworks.
This being said, from an academicians point of view (to which I so far can still consider myself to belong to, albeit perhaps not for much longer), I do appreciate most things Jeremy and his team has brought into the spotlight, e.g. insights around learning rate and embeddings for sparse categoricals. What amuses me most is that these things are by no means very new, but I enjoy the spirit of fast.ai pointing out that these things are not new and should be considered (again) today in the midst of a research community that is going way too fast.
Then again, I also think this post is a bit too much hype centric and hence falling into the same traps. I am also somewhat disappointed with fast.ai's claims to state of art lying mainly in "known" image detection and text regions, whilst not talking much or at all about e.g. RL, in courses or papers. I think the work being done here by OpenAI for instance during the past few months is far more exciting.