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Exploring PyTorch and Open-Source Communities: Interview with Soumith Chintala

Discover PyTorch's journey in an episode with Soumith Chintala, its Co-Creator and Meta's VP/Fellow. Learn about TensorFlow's impact, community-guided innovation, and the open vs. closed-source debate.
Created on July 13|Last edited on July 13


About this episode

On this episode, we’re joined by Soumith Chintala, VP/Fellow of Meta and Co-Creator of PyTorch. Soumith and his colleagues’ open-source framework impacted both the development process and the end-user experience of what would become PyTorch.
We discuss:
  • The history of PyTorch’s development and TensorFlow’s impact on development decisions.
  • How a symbolic execution model affects the implementation speed of an ML compiler.
  • The strengths of different programming languages in various development stages.
  • The importance of customer engagement as a measure of success instead of hard metrics.
  • Why community-guided innovation offers an effective development roadmap.
  • How PyTorch’s open-source nature cultivates an efficient development ecosystem.
  • The role of community building in consolidating assets for more creative innovation.
  • How to protect community values in an open-source development environment.
  • The value of an intrinsic organizational motivation structure.
  • The ongoing debate between open-source and closed-source products, especially as it relates to AI and machine learning.

Thanks For Listening!



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