The mission of AutoML is to make ML available for non-ML experts and to accelerate research on ML. We have a very similar mission at fast.ai and have helped over 200,000 non-ML experts use state-of-the-art ML (via our research, software, & teaching), yet we do not use methods from the AutoML literature. I will share several insights we've learned through this work, with the hope that they may be helpful to AutoML researchers.