Fastai2 and new course now released

Wonderful news!

Just received my RAM upgrade yesterday and I’m ready for the course.
Thanks everyone for such hard and wonderful work.
Although I started working through v3 a few weeks ago, decided to wait for v4 and I’m very much looking forward to August 21!

Cheers,
Giga

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Just wrote down a post. Feel free to edit it if something does not work.

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Thanks @kogam22. You might want to add a note that CUDA isn’t supported in WSL2 without using an Insiders build and special drivers.

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Yep. I quoted you. Thank you for the amazing things you’ve done.

Original:
I think I hope fastai will have is to teach people how to build model in pure pytorch rather than using its framework. I understand it has high accuracy and has all the tool. But I still hope that I can know how to build the model rather than living in the fastai framework.

For example, there many new state of art model that is very similar to many fastai framework that I can add to improve the result.

Edited:
I hope to know how to build complex model and fastai. I didn’t mean to remove Fastai from the course.

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It…does though? MNIST is from scratch, so is retinanet from the older course. And the resnet example too. And LSTM. Fastai is in PyTorch. So I’m confused by this. You’re also asking to remove the framework from a course on how to utilize the framework. Go take a PyTorch course if you are not pleased with the part 2’s and other courses and resources available.

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@JonathanSum
I think you’ve not checked out Part 2 of the course. Its exactly what you’re looking for.

The part1 of the course is meant for getting familiar with the framework. The motivation behind that is to let everyone- even absolute beginners, build their own models. A lot of people lose motivation when they’re overloaded with concepts over concepts, on top of coding bugs that they’re not yet comfortable enough with to be able to solve them.
Part 2 of the course is meant to teach people how to build stuff from scratch, just as you are expecting. This course essentially follows a top-down approach, that is getting familiar with Deep Learning first, and then learning all the innards.

The point of fastai, the way I look at it, is not to teach how to use their own framework and make the learners handicapped, but to let **everyone ** experience Deep Learning first hand.

Most importantly, fastai is definitely not meant to be an exhaustive learning source. Think of it as a source that makes you ready for more complex things in the domain.
I hope that gives you a better insight.

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@ PalaashAgrawal
I agree with your point on fastai. Fastai is making neural nets uncool again. For anyone who has not studied Deeplearning before, they can even do pixel-level classification and more in just one to three days with fastai. It is about making everyone able to use every power of deep learning.

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I’ve completed 4 lessons in the v3 course, should I wait for v4, or complete v3 first?
I’m thinking I’ll complete v3, both parts, and then v4.

What would you guys suggest?

Overall, the concepts will be the same in v4 and v3-part1. Only the implementation will change. So, your approach seems good enough.

Super excited! Its coming soon!

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Hi Zachary, I can’t find the updated v3 notebooks. Did they get lost when fastai2 was renamed to fastai? I’m searching for the superres without GAN notebook. If that’s not in the coming v4 course, it would be very useful for me to have an updated version.
Thank you!

They’re now under dev_nbs/course

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Thank you :slight_smile:

Just waiting for the course to release and not gonna sleep until i complete first unit… super excited

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Few hours until the launch of v4!!
I was very excited as it’s already 21st here, later realized it’s still almost midnight of 20th in the US.
Can’t wait! Thank you for putting all the hard work you guys did and your wonderful team!!
@rachel @jeremy @muellerzr

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I realized this later on…Thank you for mentioning it again, Jeremy.

@muellerzr I had started v3 course couple of months a go and set up everything on Google Cloud platform. Now that Fastaiv2 is coming up how do I set up the environment for the new version

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When the forums & course release (IE part 1 v4 category will be public) there will be Platform threads available just as in the previous course. GCP is one of them.

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Boy O boy! the wait is real