The fast.ai partner program

fast.ai has developed many amazing things, including software, courses, and algorithms. Our focus is building stuff that helps people take advantage of AI and machine learning (AI/ML).

We’ve been asked by organizations many times over the years for help. Therefore, we are building a partner program, which allows businesses to become part of our global community, to help them access the resources and advice they need to take advantage of what we are building. We’re looking for organizations who want to become thought leaders in the AI/ML space to be a part of this network during this early stage of its development.

Tap Into a Network of Experts

The partner program provides access to a network of independent experts, each of whom has been working with fast.ai technologies for years. These experts are trusted members of the global fast.ai community, and can help you with your AI/ML development projects. This community also provides support internally for each other, so partner organizations will get access to the deep expertise of the entire expert network.

The expert network can assist with projects by:

Leading or contributing deep technical assistance on AI projects covering areas such as computer vision, natural language processing, tabular analysis, and recommendation systems
Reviewing the path from idea to implementation for AI projects, and identifying and implementing opportunities to reduce friction along that path
Helping your team complete the fast.ai courses, either through customised in-person versions of the lessons customised for your needs, or through acting as a “teaching assistant”, answering questions and providing support as your team works through fast.ai’s online materials
Assisting your technical team in becoming deeply familiar with the most important current AI technologies
Streamlining your software development process to increase productivity and software reliability.

Leverage the fast.ai portfolio

fast.ai’s portfolio will be used to help the fast.ai experts help your organization, such as:

Software. We built the fastai deep learning library, which comes with high-level components that can quickly and easily provide state-of-the-art results in standard deep learning domains, while also providing researchers with low-level components that can be mixed and matched to build new approaches. We have extensively documented the design of the fastai library in a peer-reviewed research paper.

Courses. We offer free courses ranging from Practical Deep Learning for Coders, to Practical Data Ethics, and Computational Linear Algebra for Coders. We leverage the best available research on teaching methods to try to fix existing problems with technical teaching. For example, our courses are famous for their top-down teaching methodology which has students applying state-of-the-art deep learning models in the first lesson of the course.

Research. We develop cutting edge techniques that make deep learning easier, faster, and cheaper. Our methods have won competitions such as Stanford University’s DAWNBench, where our methods were both the cheapest and fastest at training an image classifier to 94% accuracy on the CIFAR 10 dataset, and the fastest on publicly available infrastructure on the Imagenet dataset. We introduced ULMFit, which applied transfer learning to language models, outperforming the state-of-the-art on six text classification tasks, and reducing errors by 18-24% on the majority of datasets. We are currently partnering with like-minded organizations, including Stability AI and Hugging Face to research techniques to make generative modelling more accessible.

Exploratory programming. We believe that exploratory programming is the biggest untapped breakthrough in programmer productivity. Notebooks are the key. They let you interactively run sections of your source code as you write it, without any context switching. We built nbdev to make notebooks a first-class development environment. We now write all of our software at fast.ai in notebooks with nbdev. Our experts can help you try out nbdev and exploratory programming to see if you too can get the 4-5x productivity boost that we’ve seen internally using this approach.

Getting started with the partner program

The partner program is available to businesses of all shapes and sizes, providing access to the expertise of our global network of independent subject-matter experts, as well as resources from our portfolio. It doesn’t matter if you already have significant AI/ML development experience or if you’re brand new to the space.

If you are interested in learning more, email [email protected] and we will aim to respond within 24 hours. In your email, please tell us a bit about the projects you’d like help with.