Welcome to PyTorch Fundamentals, the first course in the PyTorch for Deep Learning Professional Certificate. PyTorch has become one of the most widely used frameworks in AI and is a tool that researchers rely on, engineers build with, and students and professionals everywhere want to learn. In fact, a large part of the recent generative AI revolution is powered by PyTorch, but the path to learning it isn't always clear. There are tutorials everywhere, and it can be hard to know what's relevant and what's high quality when you're just starting out. That's why we put together this clear, structured path for learning PyTorch. You start at the fundamentals and then build up to more advanced architectures step by step. And I'm excited to introduce Lawrence Moroney, whose courses and books have helped millions of people get started with AI and deep learning. Lawrence has been working with PyTorch extensively for many years and seen how it's changing the way we build models. So Lawrence, what got you excited about teaching PyTorch? I think one of the things that, when I first really started looking at PyTorch, is that, remember way back you and I, we did some TensorFlow specializations and TensorFlow courses, and one of the most beloved ones was we did something called the Keras Functional API. And what the Keras Functional API did was it changed everything for me in that you weren't designing your models to be linear. You could start thinking about more exotic models with Siamese networks and skip level and stuff like that. And when I started then looking into PyTorch, PyTorch just did that natively. How you design your network and how you design your forward pass in code, it just made it simple and it was like the default experience rather than an add-on experience. And that got me really, really excited about, like, wow, I can start really building much more advanced models much more simply. That's what I love about this first course, is that we're going to start building right away. We're going to just look at our first PyTorch model. We'll write the code, we'll run it, we'll watch it learn from data. But by the end, we'll actually have an image classifier that can label, like, objects in an image. One of the things that Keras did well back then, and now PyTorch, is let you put together building blocks that could more easily be put together to form more complex architectures. I'm just really excited about that, how we can just help learners on that journey to go from zero all the way up to the most advanced architectures by that block-based approach that you mentioned. I know a lot of us prompt large language models, it lets you get a lot done. But beyond a certain point, a lot of my teams do very advanced things with cutting-edge models, be it fine-tuning cutting-edge generative AI models, to tuning very high- performance on visual AI models. So I think in today's world, with a lot of work going on in AI, this is a particularly important skill set. I also want to help you to understand that even if you're just getting started on your journey, by starting with code, by starting with understanding the fundamentals and using a powerful framework like PyTorch, it's really setting you up for success in this world. One other thing that I find delightful about PyTorch is the ease of use actually makes it more fun. Because when you're playing around, downloading an open-source PyTorch package, the relative ease with which you could, you know, get the Transformers library from Hugging Face and fine-tune them, it actually makes it more fun. So in addition to, you know, finding jobs, which is absolutely important, I find that the speed also just makes this work more enjoyable. Absolutely agree. And I think that ease of use, not just for building, but also, like, when things go wrong, to be able to find and fix problems and debug them, you know, allows you to be more successful quickly. So with this Professional Certificate, started the first course on the fundamentals, but eventually going up to the Professional Certificate, I think it'll make learners much more job-ready. I hope you enjoy learning PyTorch. Let's go on to the next video and get started.