PyTorch Has a New Home: Meta Announces Independent Foundation

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Meta today announced that its artificial intelligence (AI) research framework, PyTorch, has a new home. It is moving to an independent PyTorch Foundation, which will become part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation, a technology consortium whose primary mission is the collaborative development of open source software.

According to Aparna Ramani, VP of Engineering at Meta, next year's focus will be on achieving a seamless transition from Meta to Foundation.

Long term, “The mission is really to drive the adoption of AI tools,” she told VentureBeat. "We want to foster and maintain an ecosystem of vendor-neutral projects that are open source around PyTorch, so the goal for us is to democratize cutting-edge tools, libraries, and other components that make innovations accessible to everyone. "

Since PyTorch was founded six years ago, some 2,400 contributors have built more than 150,000 projects on the framework, according to Meta. As a result, PyTorch has become one of the leading platforms for AI research as well as commercial production use, including as the technology foundation for Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and OpenAI. Event

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“The new PyTorch Foundation Board will include many AI leaders who have helped bring the community to where it is today, including Meta and our partners at AMD, Amazon, Google , Microsoft and Nvidia," Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta, said in an emailed press comment. "I'm excited to continue to grow the PyTorch community and advance AI research."

Ramani will sit on the foundation's board as a representative of Meta. She told VentureBeat that moving from PyTorch was a natural transition.

"It's not something sudden - it's an evolution of how we've always operated PyTorch as a community," Ramani said. “It is a natural transition for us to create a neutral and equal foundation, including many industry partners who can govern the future growth of PyTorch and ensure that it benefits everyone in the industry. "

While freed from direct oversight, Meta said it intends to continue to use Pytorch as its primary AI research platform and will "support it financially accordingly ". However, Zuckerberg noted that the company plans to maintain "a clear separation between business and technical governance" of the foundation.

Ramani pointed out that when PyTorch was started as a small project by a small group of Meta researchers, no one expected or anticipated the kind of growth it enjoyed.

"It was really the researchers who said, let's solve this problem," she said. "But as soon as we started building it, it was clear that PyTorch was solving something absolutely essential to what the industry needed at the time - so it resonated with the direction that research is taking. AI given the speed of innovation and flexibility that...