In episode 66 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Soumith Chintala.
Soumith is a Research Engineer at Meta AI Research in NYC. He is the co-creator and lead of Pytorch, and maintains a number of other open-source ML projects including Torch-7 and EBLearn. Soumith has previously worked on robotics, object and human detection, generative modeling, AI for video games, and ML systems research.
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Outline:
(00:00) Intro
(01:30) Soumith’s intro to AI journey to Pytorch
(05:00) State of computer vision early in Soumith’s career
(09:15) Institutional inertia and sunk costs in academia, identifying fads
(12:45) How Soumith started working on GANs, frustrations
(17:45) State of ML frameworks early in the deep learning era, differentiators
(23:50) Frameworks and leveling the playing field, exceptions
(25:00) Contributing to Torch and evolution into Pytorch
(29:15) Soumith’s product vision for ML frameworks
(32:30) From product vision to concrete features in Pytorch
(39:15) Progressive disclosure of complexity (Chollet) in Pytorch
(41:35) Building an open source community
(43:25) The different players in today’s ML framework ecosystem
(49:35) ML frameworks pioneered by Yann LeCun and Léon Bottou, their influences on Pytorch
(54:37) Pytorch 2.0 and looking to the future
(58:00) Soumith’s adventures in household robotics
(1:03:25) Advice for aspiring ML practitioners
(1:07:10) Be cool like Soumith and subscribe :)
(1:07:33) Outro
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