Jeremy Howard

Before his start-ups, he spent eight years in management consulting at McKinseyMcKinsey & CompanyMcKinsey & Company is a management consulting firm headquartered in New York, United States. It was founded in Chicago in 1926 by University of Chicago professor James O. McKinsey and, after Marvin Bower established its “professional service” principles, grew into one of the largest pure consulting firms in the world; as of October 2026 it has more than 100 offices in over 50 countries and about 40,000 employees. It has also repeatedly faced regulatory investigations and public criticism over episodes such as its work with Enron, a former leader’s insider trading case, and its consulting for opioid manufacturers.Open the full entry & Co and AT Kearney.⁠[1]

In 1999 he and his school friend Rob Mueller created the Melbourne-based e-mail service FastMail.FM.⁠[2]

Rob Mueller recalled that Howard built the first prototype because e-mail options for people on the road were limited, and funded early development from his savings; at first the two were the only developers and also handled support and system administration, positioning FastMail as a premium e-mail provider.⁠[3]

The Australian company Optimal Decisions Group developed analytics software for insurers, using predictive modelling, multi-year simulation and optimisation to price auto and home insurance. On March 31, 2008, ChoicePoint announced it was acquiring the company; terms were not disclosed.⁠[4]

He was the company’s founding CEO.⁠[5]

In May 2010 the Norwegian browser company Opera announced its acquisition of FastMail.FM; terms were not disclosed, and some staff were to move to Norway.⁠[2]

After meeting Anthony GoldbloomAnthony GoldbloomAnthony Goldbloom is an Australian-born entrepreneur and the co-founder and former chief executive of Kaggle, a data science competition platform. After Google acquired Kaggle in 2017, he continued to lead Kaggle within Google until 2022; he is now co-founder and CEO of the sales intelligence company Sumble and an investment partner at AIX Ventures.Open the full entry at a statistics meet-up in Melbourne, he became the first angel investor in the data science competition platform KaggleKaggleKaggle is an online community and competition platform for data scientists and machine learning practitioners, where users can enter machine learning competitions, find and publish datasets, and write and share analysis code. It was founded in 2010 by Anthony Goldbloom and Ben Hamner, acquired by Google in 2017, and is now part of Google.Open the full entry; he had also been its top-ranked competitor, and later served as Kaggle’s president and chief data scientist.⁠[6]

In November 2011 Kaggle raised US$11 million in a Series A round from investors including Index Ventures, Khosla VenturesKhosla VenturesKhosla Ventures (KV) is an American venture capital firm founded in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, and headquartered in Menlo Park, California. It made heavy early bets on clean technology, became OpenAI’s first venture capital investor in 2019, and its portfolio also includes companies such as DoorDash, Block (formerly Square), Impossible Foods, and Rocket Lab.Open the full entry and SV AngelSV AngelSV Angel is a San Francisco venture capital firm cofounded in 2009 by angel investor Ron Conway and former Google executive David Lee. It typically writes small follow-on checks in seed rounds and has invested in companies such as Airbnb, Pinterest, and Dropbox; in 2018 it said it would no longer raise new funds from outside investors, and from 2022 it set up growth funds.Open the full entry, with PayPalPayPalPayPal Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: PYPL) is an American digital payments company that operates payment brands including PayPal, Venmo, Braintree, and Xoom, providing online and in-store payments, money transfers, and consumer credit to consumers and merchants worldwide.Open the full entry co-founder Max Levchin becoming chairman; the company had moved its operations to San Francisco.⁠[7]

In August 2014 he was co-founder and CEO of the new company Enlitic, which trained computers on large sets of anonymised medical images showing conditions such as brain tumours so they could flag them for physicians.⁠[8]

In December 2014 he gave the TEDxBrussels talk The wonderful and terrifying implications of computers that can learn, on advances in deep learning; at the time of writing it had about 2.78 million plays on the TED website.⁠[9]

On October 7, 2016, he and the mathematician Rachel Thomas announced the research lab fast.ai, aiming to let domain experts use deep learning themselves; its first course was offered through the University of San Francisco’s Data Institute.⁠[10]

On January 18, 2018, he and Sebastian Ruder posted a paper on arXiv proposing ULMFiT (Universal Language Model Fine-tuning), a transfer-learning method applicable to any NLP task; the paper found that it outperformed the state of the art on six text classification tasks, reducing error by 18–24% on most datasets.⁠[11]

The paper was accepted at the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2018), held in Melbourne on July 15–20, 2018.⁠[12]

In the DAWNBench competition run by Stanford researchers, the top three places for fastest and cheapest training on the CIFAR-10 image task all went to researchers affiliated with fast.ai; he attributed his students’ win to creative thinking, using the super convergence technique devised by Leslie Smith.⁠[13]

In August 2018 a fast.ai team trained on ImageNet in 18 minutes using 16 Amazon Web Services instances at a compute cost of about $40; he claimed this was about 40 percent better than GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry’s effort, while acknowledging that comparison was tricky because the hardware differed.⁠[14]

In November 2018 the USF Data Institute launched the Wicklow AI and Medical Research Initiative (WAMRI), funded by a gift from Wicklow Capital, to develop practical AI applications in oncology, cardiology and neurology.⁠[15]

He was a Distinguished Research Scientist at the University of San Francisco and the founding chair of WAMRI.⁠[5]

He appeared on episode 35 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast as the founder of fast.ai, in an episode on fast.ai’s deep learning courses and research.⁠[16]

In February 2020 he and Sylvain Gugger published the paper Fastai: A Layered API for Deep Learning in the journal Information, volume 11, issue 2.⁠[17]

The paper presented fastai version 2, offering ready-made components for practitioners and modular building blocks for researchers; the authors then expected an official release around July 2020.⁠[18]

During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, after discussing mask research in a USF deep learning class, he started the #Masks4All movement, writing a commentary for The Washington PostThe Washington PostThe Washington Post is an American daily newspaper founded in Washington in 1877, known for its role in the Pentagon Papers case and the Watergate investigation. Run by the Meyer–Graham family for eighty years from 1933, it has been owned personally by Jeff Bezos since 2013.Open the full entry and appearing on CNNCNNCNN (Cable News Network) is an Atlanta-based news organization founded by Ted Turner on June 1, 1980, as the world’s first 24-hour television news channel. It has been owned in turn by Turner Broadcasting System, Time Warner, AT&T and Warner Bros. Discovery, became part of Skydance Corporation along with Warner Bros. Discovery in October 2026, and is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry to advocate public mask use.⁠[19]

In July 2020 O’Reilly published Deep Learning for Coders with fastai and PyTorch, co-written with Sylvain Gugger, a 621-page book for programmers comfortable with Python but with little math background.⁠[20]

In January 2021 he was first author of a review of the evidence on face masks in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, volume 118, issue 4; it concluded that mask wearing reduces transmissibility per contact and recommended that governments encourage widespread public mask use.⁠[21]

In March 2022 the University of Queensland’s School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science appointed him an Honorary Professor, with him teaching fast.ai’s seven-week Practical Deep Learning for Coders course there from April; he was then also chief scientist at platform.ai.⁠[22]

On December 12, 2023, he announced the AI R&D lab Answer.AI, serving as founding CEO, with Lean Startup creator Eric Ries as founding director and a $10 million investment from Decibel VC; he said its mission was the same as fast.ai’s and that the team would be fully remote.⁠[23]

On March 6, 2024, Answer.AI released its first project, an open-source system combining FSDP and QLoRA that can train a 70-billion-parameter language model on two 24GB consumer gaming GPUs, with collaborators including Tim Dettmers and Hugging Face’s Titus von Koeller.⁠[24]

That year he wrote that California’s SB 1047 bill would reduce safety by restricting open-source AI (April 29), and released the web framework FastHTML (August 3) and the /llms.txt proposal for websites to provide information to large language models (September 3).⁠[25]

On November 7, 2024, he announced that fast.ai was joining Answer.AI and launched the course How To Solve It With Code on the in-house solveit platform, promoting Dialog Engineering, in which humans and AI work in small steps; he later added that the first cohort sold out within 24 hours and that a new course would start on November 3, 2025.⁠[26]

He was listed as a keynote speaker at the Linux Foundation’s PyTorch Conference 2025.⁠[27]

He gave the keynote at AI Engineer Melbourne, held at Federation Square in Melbourne.⁠[28]

He is an Honorary Professor at the University of Queensland and a Digital Fellow at Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry, and created the fastai software library; fast.ai states that Enlitic was named one of MIT Technology Review’s 50 smartest companies two years running and that Optimal Decisions Group was later purchased by LexisNexis.⁠[1]

X: Public account: https://x.com/jeremyphoward (opens in a new window)⁠[23]

fast.ai: Official website: https://www.fast.ai/ (opens in a new window)⁠[10]

Answer.AI: Official website: https://www.answer.ai/ (opens in a new window)⁠[23]

FastMail: Official website: https://www.fastmail.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[3]

Kaggle: Official website: https://www.kaggle.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]