Python lovers, here's a library that will help you master AI as a newbie

If you've been thinking about trying to learn deep learning, here's a new software library that promises to make things easy. Fast.ai, a startup co-founded by Rachel Thomas and Jeremy Howard, a professor and research scientist both working at the University of San Francisco, have released a free open source framework that works on top of PyTorch. Known as fastai (without a dot), it's aimed at budding coders that have some experience with Python. It includes some of the most popular algorithms for image classification and natural language tasks so that models can be quickly built and run in just few lines of code. No other library that we know of provides such an easy way to leverage Nvidia's latest technology, which gives two to three times better performance compared to previous approaches," the startup announced on Tuesday. Fast.ai is known for its free deep learning introductory courses that have been completed by people that don't necessarily have technical backgrounds. "Our goal is to get to a point where we don't need to teach courses any more - where we've made deep learning so easy to use, that anyone can use it (and get world-class results) without needing to take a course," Howard told The Register. "The only way to get there is for us to write software that makes deep learning easier.