It's sad to see this perspective. With the AI hype, there are so many people spending all their time and money on marketing AI materials while their actual product is all smoke and mirrors.
By contrast, Jeremy and team have proven that "build it and they will come" is not dead. They built high quality courses and quickly became authoritative with no marketing and with full transparency and openness in everything they do.
This book draft looks great. Everyone else is talking about "democratising AI" - this is actually doing it.
We're building and improving our internal machine learning platform. We decided recently to support the fast.ai courses. You get everything you need (notebook, object storage, data, parameters and mettics tracking and deployment). Our colleague teaches at university and we're opening the internal platform to about 30 of her students this week to prepare their final masters project.
They don't have access to compute power (GPUs) or bandwidth to download datasets hundreds of gigabytes of data, which they'll find right there, so this should help them since they don't need to have powerful machines or worry about experiment tracking.
We also have a Publish option to make an application from a notebook in one click behind the scenes with training parameters in a form generated automatically, so they can write scripts and instrument model training.
The fast.ai course will also help current or future members, and other students. It's important for us to make it even easier for people to enter the field.
By contrast, Jeremy and team have proven that "build it and they will come" is not dead. They built high quality courses and quickly became authoritative with no marketing and with full transparency and openness in everything they do.
This book draft looks great. Everyone else is talking about "democratising AI" - this is actually doing it.