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The name fastai sounds suspicious. There is "fast" and "AI" in it, so I fear that it makes the easy things easier and the hard things harder. It just sounds lik

The name fastai sounds suspicious. There is "fast" and "AI" in it, so I fear that it makes the easy things easier and the hard things harder. It just sounds like too much fluff. We obviously don't have AI yet (but pretty convincing machine learning models) and we won't get it in the next years (not fast) - so if software, a company or an organization puts "ai" in its name (or chooses it as top-level domain) I suspect they just want to ride the hype train and am very skeptical ... @Topic: What is the difference to Keras, PyTorch, etc.? They are already pretty high-level and the basic models for common tasks are available in all libraries at that point.

deleted 8y ago
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pure-awesome 8y ago
I mean, _just_ basing your impression off of the name is not going to get you very far. As a first impression, sure, but if a bunch of comments are saying they really like it, maybe it's worth doing a bit more exploration. And AI is commonly-used as basically a synonym for Machine Learning in the ML community. Yes, the word has multiple definitions and connotations, and some people prefer to avoid using the term AI at all because of that. But that doesn't meant that someone using the term AI to refer to ML is wrong or up to something. Furthermore, just because non-legitimate organizations want to ride the hype train, it doesn't mean legitimate ones shouldn't benefit from that effect as well. fast.ai is an organization actually writing software for doing machine learning, as opposed to a completely unrelated company (like an electric toothbrush company) claiming their latest product "uses AI" whatever that means. The funniest part is that the slogan for fast.ai "Making neural nets uncool again". If that isn't explicitly going against the hype and saying this is _actual_ neural nets and not just fluff, then I don't know what is.
- zeptomu 8y ago
  > I mean, _just_ basing your impression off of the name is not going to get you very far. There are so many neural networks libraries now and I don't find the time to test all of them - dismissing libraries that use .ai in their website's TLD (or in their name) served me very well so far. Sure if it really makes neural networks that much simpler to train, I will take a look, but for now it does not seem to be more high-level than Keras or PyTorch. It does not matter if you can describe your network in 50, 100 or 200 lines of code as the hard part is to make it learn, choose hyper parameters, change loss functions, etc. - this is possible in all frameworks. And I don't think AI is used as a synonym for machine learning in the community, but is used to describe AGI.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

pure-awesome 8y ago

I mean, _just_ basing your impression off of the name is not going to get you very far. As a first impression, sure, but if a bunch of comments are saying they really like it, maybe it's worth doing a bit more exploration. And AI is commonly-used as basically a synonym for Machine Learning in the ML community. Yes, the word has multiple definitions and connotations, and some people prefer to avoid using the term AI at all because of that. But that doesn't meant that someone using the term AI to refer to ML is wrong or up to something. Furthermore, just because non-legitimate organizations want to ride the hype train, it doesn't mean legitimate ones shouldn't benefit from that effect as well. fast.ai is an organization actually writing software for doing machine learning, as opposed to a completely unrelated company (like an electric toothbrush company) claiming their latest product "uses AI" whatever that means. The funniest part is that the slogan for fast.ai "Making neural nets uncool again". If that isn't explicitly going against the hype and saying this is _actual_ neural nets and not just fluff, then I don't know what is.

zeptomu 8y ago
> I mean, _just_ basing your impression off of the name is not going to get you very far. There are so many neural networks libraries now and I don't find the time to test all of them - dismissing libraries that use .ai in their website's TLD (or in their name) served me very well so far. Sure if it really makes neural networks that much simpler to train, I will take a look, but for now it does not seem to be more high-level than Keras or PyTorch. It does not matter if you can describe your network in 50, 100 or 200 lines of code as the hard part is to make it learn, choose hyper parameters, change loss functions, etc. - this is possible in all frameworks. And I don't think AI is used as a synonym for machine learning in the community, but is used to describe AGI.