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Comment by dcx | Hacker News Reader

This kind of looks like submarine marketing ala pg [1]. But I'm very interested in this topic nevertheless. Has anyone taken this course? Or if not, would anyone be able to recommend the current best resources for acquiring useful AI / machine learning skills, for the average software engineer?

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

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Hi, I wrote the piece. No PR was involved. I’ve been following fast.ai for a while and I thought it was part of an interesting trend

My basic rule with stories is that they must come from me casting my attention out into the world, not via a bidding war for it in my inbox. I run a whitelist and never read inbound PR. I only email comms people when I a) can’t find a person’s details b) the person asks me to

Does the economist have a standard definition of AI they run with, and/or do you? I find a lot of technologies get bundled together/labeled AI and it makes it hard to discuss or analyze such a broad swathe of things that could be AI depending on how the org has labeled them.

I've taken the course. It's the best out there. Jeremy and Rachel do a phenomenal job and they're taking a contrarian stance to a lot of others in how they encourage anyone with even a little bit of programming experience to go for it. It's also a free course so it's not like they'd make tons of cash on covert advertising operations...

Have you been able to apply the learnings to any problems at work, or to switch jobs?

From taking the course I realized that I wanted to do deep learning rather than what I was going into otherwise (likely some other kind of data science or fintech). I quit my job to go harder on deep learning studying and apply to jobs, but I ended up getting excited about doing a startup.

Now I'm working on Stowbots (stowbots.com) and trying to bring the power of deep learning to everyone's internet browsing.

Awesome. Good luck!

I started with Andrew Ng's Coursera class. There are 5 different courses and I went through the first course and 3/4 through the 4th on conv nets. I would say he does a really good job of explaining the basics but the code is a little dated as AI is moving so fast.

I'm a few weeks in to Fast.ai and the professor keeps it high level and has more focus on application than theory. You jump straight into working on image classification which is broken down into clear concise steps that gives you some confidence moving forward. If you do take the course make sure to plug in your own data and get a feel for how everything works before jumping to the next video.

I would say its good to have some knowledge of the basics, so watch a few weeks worth of Andrews course while it's still free(7 day trial). Skip over the programming assignments because they are too low level and verbose. Then when you think you have a good sense how things work jump over to Fast.ai and start coding.

would anyone be able to recommend the current best resources for acquiring useful AI / machine learning skills, for the average software engineer?

EdX has a good one, I wrote about my experience of it here https://gaius.tech/2018/08/08/microsoft-professional-program...

The tooling and libraries are very good now; assuming you already had the data in a good shape, you could do something commercially useful with Keras in a day or two from first picking it up. There is still quite a lot of low hanging fruit around but these skills are well on their way to becoming commoditized so I don’t know how much longer that will last.

What is the course you are referring to? This is a pay walled article.

http://course.fast.ai/

fast.ai is known for extensive marketing here on HN.

Or maybe many here (such as me) have done and loved the fast.ai course

Can you be specific?

fast.ai has no revenue at all, no investment dollars at all, no marketing team, and no PR budget. It's entirely self-funded out of my pocket personally in order to help people. The courses are all free, there are no ads, and the software is all open source.

Neither I nor anyone else at fast.ai has ever asked anyone to comment on an HN post, or to post anything to HN.

edit: Just noticed last time fast.ai was mentioned on HN you that made a similar claim. @dang and I both responded to you then. So this is not just some misunderstanding, but repeated and intentional falsehoods. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18096807

They may just be genuinely unaware of how organically successful you guys are. But maybe I'm being overly charitable.

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