This is exactly the kind of course I’ve wanted to do for some time now. Even before stable diffusion it felt like other media synthesis applications like StyleGAN were what I wanted to learn, but most machine learning courses focus on more traditional data science topics.
Of course you can start with a more traditional course and then learn something like stable diffusion afterwards, but as a newbie it’s quite hard to figure out where to even start. A full-fledged course that takes you exactly where you want to go is a lot easier and I think it can help learners to stay motivated because they have a clear goal in mind. If I want to learn how to create cool images, I want to spend as little time as possible predicting housing prices in the Bay Area.
> If I want to learn how to create cool images, I want to spend as little time as possible predicting housing prices in the Bay Area.
I think that's somewhat of a dangerous mindset to have. If you want to create cool images you can use pre-trained models and high-level APIs without needing to understand any of the internals.
But if you want to truly understand how these models work, you need to make effort to study the basics. Maybe not predicting housing prices, but learn the foundational math and primitives behind all of the components from the ground up (and the Diffusion models are a complex beast made up of many components). And getting an intuitive understanding of how models behave when you tune certain knobs takes much longer. Many researchers in the field have spent years developing their intuition of what works and what doesn't.
Both of these are fine, but I think I think we should stop encouraging people to be in the middle. Have courses that that promise "Learn Deep Learning / Transformers / Diffusion models in 7 days!" but then go on and teach you how to call blackbox APIs, giving you an illusion of knowledge and understanding where there is none. I don't know if this applies to this specific course, but there are a bunch of those out there, and highly recommend staying away from those. I know it's a hard sell in this modern instant gratification age, but if you actually want to understand something you need to put in some possibly hard work.
https://nitter.namazso.eu/jeremyphoward/status/1568843940690...
> fast.ai
> Do that and your life will change
Sounds like Emad Mostaque of Stability AI / stable diffusion thinks this course probably won't fall into "do this, no understanding needed" trap (I'm not contradicting anything you said here).