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Aleksa is great.

Also check out Jeremy Howard from fast.ai - also no PhD but amazing teacher and contributes actively to research.

Chris Olah (Google Brain, OpenAI, etc) go to university at all.

PhD definitely not required.

I tried to build on top of fast.ai, and it was very easy to start, but all the hooks and magic in fast.ai 2 just made it extremely hard for me to understand and extend the code. I believe it went in a bad direction.

When tensorflow was the dominate api, fast.ai made a lot of sense. Nowadays pytorch seems to have won and it is easy to use directly and there is PyTorch Lightning if you want things even easier to write.

There are a several videos on youtube where the creator reviews a paper and then implements it from scratch. For example this channel is pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/c/AladdinPersson/playlists

fast.ai is built on top of pytorch just like pytorch lightning

You're heralding literal geniuses like Jeremy Howard as examples of "PhD not required". Yes, if you are Jeremy Howard or Leonardo DaVinci, sure you'll excel at this stuff without studying a degree.

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