Jeremy Howard is a co-founder of fast.ai, the non-profit research group behind the popular massive open online course "Practical Deep Learning for Coders", and the open source deep learning library "fastai".

Jeremy is also a co-founder of #Masks4All, a global volunteer organization founded in March 2020 that advocated for the public adoption of homemade face masks in order to help slow the spread of COVID-19. His Washington Post article "Simple DIY masks could help flatten the curve." went viral in late March/early April 2020, and is associated with the U.S CDC's change in guidance a few days later to recommend wearing masks in public.

In this episode, Jeremy explains how diffusion works and how individuals with limited compute budgets can engage meaningfully with large, state-of-the-art models. Then, as our first-ever repeat guest on Gradient Dissent, Jeremy revisits a previous conversation with Lukas on Python vs. Julia for machine learning.

Finally, Jeremy shares his perspective on the early days of COVID-19, and what his experience as one of the earliest and most high-profile advocates for widespread mask-wearing was like.

Show notes (transcript and links): http://wandb.me/gd-jeremy-howard-2

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⏳ Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
1:06 Diffusion and generative models
14:40 Engaging with large models meaningfully
20:30 Jeremy's thoughts on Stable Diffusion and OpenAI
26:38 Prompt engineering and large language models
32:00 Revisiting Julia vs. Python
40:22 Jeremy's science advocacy during early COVID days
1:01:03 Researching how to improve children's education
1:07:43 The importance of executive buy-in
1:11:34 Outro
1:12:02 Bonus: Weights & Biases

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📝 Links
📍 Jeremy's previous Gradient Dissent episode (8/25/2022): http://wandb.me/gd-jeremy-howard
📍 "Simple DIY masks could help flatten the curve. We should all wear them in public.", Jeremy's viral Washington Post article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outloo...
📍 "An evidence review of face masks against COVID-19" (Howard et al., 2021), one of the first peer-reviewed papers on the effectiveness of wearing masks: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas...
📍 Jeremy's Twitter thread summary of "An evidence review of face masks against COVID-19":   / 1348771993949151232  
📍 Read more about Jeremy's mask-wearing advocacy: https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-am...

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Connect with Jeremy and fast.ai:
📍 Jeremy on Twitter:   / jeremyphoward  
📍 fast.ai on Twitter:   / fastdotai  
📍 Jeremy on LinkedIn:   / howardjeremy  

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💬 Host: Lukas Biewald
📹 Producers: Riley Fields, Angelica Pan

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