# Jeremy Howard

> Jeremy Howard is an Australian data scientist, entrepreneur and educator who co-founded fast.ai, developed ULMFiT with Sebastian Ruder, and now leads Answer.AI. His work connects practical AI research, free teaching and software tools designed to help more people build and understand technology.

- **Role:** Founding CEO of Answer.AI
- **Organizations:** Answer.AI, fast.ai, University of Queensland, Kaggle, Fastmail, Optimal Decisions Group, Enlitic, University of San Francisco
- **Nationality:** Australian
- **Education:** Studied philosophy; degree not confirmed, University of Melbourne
- **Known for:** Co-founded fast.ai and made Practical Deep Learning for Coders freely available., Co-authored the 2018 ULMFiT paper, a significant early demonstration of transfer learning for NLP., Created the fastai software library and helped create FastHTML.

## Career timeline

- **1990s** — Worked in management consulting at McKinsey & Company and A.T. Kearney.
- **1999** — Co-founded Fastmail, the email service.
- **2010s** — Served as president and chief scientist of Kaggle after ranking first in its competitions for two years.
- **2016** — Co-founded fast.ai with Rachel Thomas and launched free practical deep learning courses.
- **2018** — Published ULMFiT research with Sebastian Ruder and released fastai v1 for PyTorch.
- **2020** — Co-authored Deep Learning for Coders with fastai and PyTorch with Sylvain Gugger.
- **2023** — Launched Answer.AI with Eric Ries as founding CEO.
- **2024** — Answer.AI introduced FastHTML; fast.ai joined Answer.AI and announced How To Solve It With Code.
- **2025** — Expanded Solveit and wrote about software craftsmanship in the age of AI agents.
- **2026** — Continued Answer.AI and fast.ai work as Rachel Thomas returned to the team.

## Achievements

- Co-founded fast.ai and made Practical Deep Learning for Coders freely available.
- Co-authored the 2018 ULMFiT paper, a significant early demonstration of transfer learning for NLP.
- Created the fastai software library and helped create FastHTML.
- Ranked first in Kaggle machine-learning competitions for two years, according to fast.ai.
- Co-authored Deep Learning for Coders with fastai and PyTorch with Sylvain Gugger.
- Founded or co-founded Fastmail, Optimal Decisions Group, Enlitic and Answer.AI.

## Latest updates

- **2026-08** — Rachel Thomas wrote that she had returned to Answer.AI and was working with Howard and the team on Solveit.
- **2025-10** — Howard published Build to Last and helped expand the Solveit course and platform.
- **2024-12** — Howard was among the authors of Answer.AI's ModernBERT announcement.

## Links

- Website: https://jeremy.fast.ai/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/howardjeremy/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/jeremyphoward
- GitHub: https://github.com/jph00
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@howardjeremyp
- Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/howard.fm

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/jeremy-howard
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-09-29