Meta is spinning off the PyTorch framework into its own AI research foundation 🎈🌍
Accelerating AI/ML Open Source Collaboration
Hey Guys,
Happy Monday. So it seems like Meta is spinning out PyTorch. Increasingly it seems that The PyTorch Foundation wants to be seen as a “neutral home” for the deep learning community to collaborate on the open source PyTorch framework and ecosystem.
TensorFlow offers better visualization, which allows developers to debug better and track the training process. PyTorch, however, provides only limited visualization. TensorFlow also beats PyTorch in deploying trained models to production, thanks to the TensorFlow Serving framework.
Today an edict came down from the Zuck:
Meta AI believes these are the takeaways:
TL;DR Takeaways
PyTorch, one of the leading community-driven AI research frameworks, is moving to a new, independent PyTorch Foundation that will be part of the Linux Foundation.
The PyTorch Foundation will democratize access to state-of-the-art AI tools, libraries and other components to accelerate progress in AI.
Meta will continue to invest in PyTorch and use it as our primary framework for AI research and production applications at the company.
Sound familiar? Hey Hugging Face and so many others!
What you Need to know?
To accelerate progress in AI, PyTorch is moving to a new, independent PyTorch Foundation, under the Linux Foundation umbrella.
The project will join the Linux Foundation with a diverse governing board composed of representatives from AMD, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Meta, Microsoft Azure, and Nvidia, with the intention to expand over time. The PyTorch Foundation will act as a responsible steward for the technology and support PyTorch through conferences, training courses, and other initiatives.
The foundation’s mission is to drive adoption of AI tooling by fostering and sustaining an ecosystem of open source, vendor-neutral projects with PyTorch. It will democratize state-of-the-art tools, libraries, and other components to make these innovations accessible to everyone.
The PyTorch Foundation will focus on the business and product marketing of PyTorch and the related ecosystem. The transition will not entail any changes to PyTorch’s code and core project, including its separate technical governance structure.
Meta will continue to invest in PyTorch and use it as our primary framework for AI research and production applications at the company.
But what’s really going on here?
A Facebook Framework - PyTorch
In 2016, Meta (then but a simple country Facebook) launched its open-source AI research library, the Pytorch framework. Six years and 150,000 projects from 2,400 contributors later it wants to spin in out. And, who can blame them? Facebook and Meta’s reputation is significantly compromised and leading to a employee churn.
I think TensorFlow adoption is out competing PyTorch at this point even in research. How BigTech molds foundations and open-source communities is really interesting to behold. The PyTorch Foundation is supported by leading contributors to the PyTorch open source project. The Foundation leverages resources provided by members and contributors to enable community discussions and collaboration.
Community collaboration is critical for the framework’s evolution as well as the development of associated projects that support using PyTorch in production and at scale. As part of The Linux Foundation, the PyTorch community will also collaborate on training, local and regional events, open source developer tooling, academic research, and guides to help new users and contributors have a productive experience.
It all really makes me wonder.
PyTorch Foundation: A new era for the cutting-edge AI framework
But Pytorch isn’t just Meta’s baby, it serves as a technological underpinning to much of Amazon’s Web Services work as well as Microsoft Azure and OpenAI. It’s known for its easy of use for those who work in Python.
So supposedly Meta cedes control of the open source project in favor of the newly-formed PyTorch Foundation, without "any of the good things" changing. It’s a bit like Google “spinning out” stuff recently.
Meta’s creations are the last places I’d ever call a “neutral home”, so I find the PR on this really deceptive and puzzling.
What do you think?
It sounds like yet another consortium of BigTech, if I have to be honest with you. , as the Pytorch Foundation, “will boast a wide-ranging governing board composed of representatives from AMD, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Meta, Microsoft Azure, and Nvidia, with the intention to expand further over time.” Oh really? A foundation with a governing board like this? Meta is quite the schemer.
Releases, features, and technical direction will still be driven by the maintainers, committers, and contributors to the project. The creation of the PyTorch Foundation ensures that decisions will be made in a transparent and open manner by a diverse group of members for many years to come.
The hype around the democratization of A.I. well it seems even Meta AI wants a piece of it.
Birth Pangs at FAIR Facebook AI Research
In 2016, a group of Meta AI researchers embarked quietly on a couple of projects. They were determined to create a single, simple, standardized interface for their end-to-end workflow.
They also harbored hopes of fixing the tedious, complicated research-to-production pipeline of the AI field. In fact, this pipeline was more of a labyrinth, involving multiple steps and tools, fragmented processes, and navigation between different frameworks that were optimized for either research or production, but not both.
The Meta team experimented with machine learning (ML) frameworks such as Theano and Torch, and with advanced concepts from Lua Torch, Chainer, and HIPS Autograd, but stayed focused on one thing above all for their new framework: usability.
Just two years later, Meta announced PyTorch 1.0, a dynamic, interactive framework that allowed developers to not only experiment rapidly but also seamlessly transition to graph-based modes for deployment.
Now six years later, they are sharing it with the world!
As reported by Engadget on Yahoo, despite being freed of direct oversight, Meta intends to continue employing Pytorch as its primary AI research platform and financially support it accordingly. Zuckerberg did note however, that the company plans to maintain “a clear separation between the business and technical governance” of the foundation.
Zuck strikes again. Mark Zuckerberg’s poor leadership skills are slowly dragging Meta toward failure, a Harvard expert says. His centralization of power truly has been devastating for democracy and the reputation of silicon Valley in recent years. I’m not sure how many machine learning experts really care though?
When things feel like BigTech Consortiums though, it makes me a bit uncomfortable.
Facebook loves consortiums as I realized in its failed Libra stablecoin attempt.
PyTorch has since grown into the lingua franca of AI research. Today, more than 80 percent of researchers who submit their work at major ML conferences, such as NeurIPS or ICML, harness the framework.
In reality we are entering a deepfake era of the internet, where synthetic AI and Bitcoin’s FOMO is going to distort our reality even further.
Check out this Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk Star TreK Deepfake:
Meta has put open science at the core of our work in AI, whether it’s releasing code for large language models, self-supervised computer vision systems, innovative new datasets, embodied AI platforms, and much more. Meanwhile more of its leadership and top AI talent continues to leave the company.
Meta’s stock is down META 0.00%↑ more than 50% year to date.
TensorFlow is an open source framework developed by Google researchers to run machine learning, deep learning and other statistical and predictive analytics workloads.
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