PyTorch has moved under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation. The machine learning framework developed by the AI department of Facebook’s parent company Meta and supported by the community will thus become a multi-stakeholder project and open source. The PyTorch Foundation aims to provide free access to modern AI tools, libraries and other components. According to Meta, it will continue to invest in PyTorch and use it as the central framework for applications and AI research in the company.
The framework is considered one of the leading platforms for developing AI models. As PyTorch becomes part of the Linux Foundation with its own foundation, the framework focuses on community and non-profit development as open source software.
There are already more than 150,000 projects developed with PyTorch on GitHub. The use cases range from large language models (LLM) to self-monitored computer vision systems to integrated AI platforms.
On the Board of Trustees: Microsoft, Google, Amazon, AMD and Nvidia
Facebook launched the framework for AI research in 2016 together with the machine learning community. According to the parent company Meta, the open cooperation and contributions from the developer community have been trend-setting from the start. Thousands of developers have contributed to the project since then, making it “one of the leading platforms for research and production in the AI community,” as Santosh Janardhan, Vice President Infrastructure, writes in the meta-blog post.
According to a Facebook post by Mark Zuckerberg, the newly established foundation will include numerous senior AI researchers from Meta, AMD, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Nvidia. Santosh Janardhan’s meta blog entry also reveals that the foundation board will continue to grow over time. For teams working with PyTorch, it may be important to note that the conversion does not result in any changes to the PyTorch code. According to the blog post, there will also be no changes to the core project and the application models.
Stakeholder Opinions
In addition to the announcement by Mark Zuckerberg on his Facebook platform, numerous stakeholders shared the news on their social media channels. The Linux Foundation announced the new addition via Twitter, and there is also a tweet from AWS. More detailed backgrounds are available in a blog entry at Meta.
