Chapter 1: Getting Started with fastai
Over the last decade, deep learning has revolutionized swathes of technology, from image recognition to machine translation. Until recently, only those with extensive training and access to specialized hardware have been able to unlock the benefits of deep learning. The fastai framework is an effort to democratize deep learning by making it accessible to non-specialists. One of the key ways that fastai opens up deep learning to the masses is by making it easy to get started.
In this chapter, we will show you what you need to get started with fastai, starting with how to set up an environment for fastai. By the end of this chapter, you will be able to do the following: set up a cloud environment in which to run fastai examples; exercise a basic fastai example; explain the relationship between fastai and PyTorch (the underlying deep learning library for fastai); and contrast fastai with Keras, the other high-level library for deep learning.
