Mar 30 • 1HR 8M

Soumith Chintala: PyTorch

On the past and present of machine learning frameworks, and the story of PyTorch and its creator.

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daniel bashir
Interviews with various people who research, build, or use AI, including academics, engineers, artists, entrepreneurs, and more.
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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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