Around New Year time usually people do yearly plans or summaries. I wanted to take time and remember some of most influential people that shaped my DL journey. Last year marked huge milestone achievement for my professional growth, I landed 1 year contract as Partner Engineer at Meta, working on Llama models. What a pleasant surprise was to find out that Sanyam @init_27 is working in my extended team. It was such a pleasure to get some nostalgia from browsing 2017-2018 course forum.
I would like to take some time to reflect on my journey and express gratitude to fast.ai forum and course. Also I would be very happy to hear about other journeys, even a lot of information is available publicly, like @radek Radek’s interview or many of Jeremy’s interviews. I think 2025 is going to be very exciting year for DL and sharing personal ideas and topics that excite us after 7 years of beginning of the journey for most of us can be exciting.
Also I wanted to express my gratitude to people, whom I still remember like kind classmates that would do extra step for more efficient learning and who created very friendly atmosphere on the forum. @EricPB for timelines to the lessons, @hiromi for wiki and lesson notes, @KevinB and @Moody for lots of helpful content. It was a pleasure to take course again every next time, and I wanted to say thanks to @stas for his contributions.
Couple of words about my journey and what excites me now. Doing fast.ai course and going to 20 in person meetups in Tel Aviv was enough for me to find amazing job in startup KanduAI. It was crazy journey, we delivered nice products to the market like age gender emotion recognition on Android devices, fruit and veg recognition (youtube link) on scales and self-checkout machines, and shopping assisntant that will recommend recipe and create shopping busket. I always was looking to give back to community, and when I got approached by recruited in LinkedIn I couldn’t believe my luck. Now part of my work is support hackathons as well as contribute to Llama recipes - quick start applications with Llama. I am very excited about the direction of LLMs to multi modality, I think that in 2025 we will see so many new applications from fields that we never thought about.
Thanks to Jeremy and Rachel for creating such a great course and community. Will be happy to hear other alumnies stories as of 2025.