
Facebook launches PyTorch 1.0 - jimarcey
https://code.fb.com/ai-research/facebook-accelerates-ai-development-with-new-partners-and-production-capabilities-for-pytorch-1-0/
======
deepGem
It's amazing to watch Pytorch and TF slowly converging and offering more or
less the same capabilities. TF started in graph mode and are now adding eager
mode. Pytorch started with eager mode (prototyping) and are now moving to
graph mode (production). TF evolved from Google's production environment so it
comes as no surprise that it was geared for production first deployments.
Pytorch evolved from researchers which explains how it was tailor made for
tinkering and prototyping. Good to see the two converging. I am guessing a
year from now there won't be any marked difference between the two.

~~~
stochastic_monk
Does pytorch come with tensor comprehensions built in, or do you have to use
them yourself?

~~~
jph00
They're not built in yet. Still suggested to compile from source. I'm not sure
if it supports PyTorch 1.0 yet. More info: [https://pytorch.org/blog/tensor-
comprehensions/](https://pytorch.org/blog/tensor-comprehensions/)

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ultrasounder
As part of partnerships announced today at the Livestream event, Udacity to
launch a new Intro to DL using PyTorch course, to be taught by Soumith
Chintala who is the creator of PyTorch and also continues to be a lead
contributor on the project. They intend to offer scholarships to 300 students
who sucessfuly complete the free course to go on to do their Deep Learning
specialization/nano-degree. Official announcement here which also links to a
page where you can signup for the course that starts in early November.
[https://blog.udacity.com/2018/10/introducing-the-pytorch-
sch...](https://blog.udacity.com/2018/10/introducing-the-pytorch-scholarship-
challenge-from-facebook.html)

~~~
koube
Looks like the Intro DL in PyTorch course isn't released yet, there's just a
"notify me" link. I searched around but I couldn't find a release date. Do you
know when the release date might be?

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krat0sprakhar
Awesome announcement. It seems they updated the website as well. Sadly the
contrast is so low that I can barely read anything :(
[https://pytorch.org/features](https://pytorch.org/features)

~~~
pesenti
Should be better now. Thanks for reporting.

~~~
dotancohen
Thanks for chiming in!

Note that these low-contrast, tiny font designs are almost universally hated.
What were the design decisions that led to that? I'm seriously interested.
Here is a UX.SE thread on it, I'm the OP:

[https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/67891/what-is-the-
rea...](https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/67891/what-is-the-reason-for-
small-lightly-coloured-text)

~~~
sangnoir
> What were the design decisions that led to that?

I'm guessing "It looks _really_ great on designer's retina display"

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byefruit
Little concerning that AMD is not one of the new partners, we really need good
competition on the Deep Learning GPU front to push Nvidia.

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laingc
I made a comment on HN some time ago now that I didn't see much PyTorch being
used in the wild or in research, and so was pessimistic about its wide
adoption.

Happily, I was thoroughly mistaken, and PyTorch has gone from strength to
strength. It's a real joy to use, and I'm excited to see its further
development.

------
SilverSlash
Pytorch - a beautiful, elegant, well thought out framework.

Tensorflow - a mess.

Anyone who has used both knows just how much of a struggle tensorflow is at
every step of the way as you fight it to perform even the simplest of task. I
just hope more people migrate to pytorch.

------
mraison
Livestream link:
[https://www.facebook.com/pytorch/videos/482401942168584](https://www.facebook.com/pytorch/videos/482401942168584)

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polskibus
Will this release change the landscape of deep learning frameworks and lessen
the Tensorflow lead? In other words, for someone that has not touched DL
before, is it worth starting with PyTorch instead of TF?

~~~
Q6T46nT668w6i3m
I don’t know. I use both. I contribute to both.

If you’re interested in supervised neural networks, Keras, in my opinion, is
the best option. You’d use CNTK, or more likely, TensorFlow for your Keras
backend.

If you’re interested in unsupervised or semi-supervised neural networks,
TensorFlow and PyTorch both work. However, they both have noteworthy issues.

Until eager execution was added to TensorFlow, TensorFlow models needed to be
compiled. It was difficult to spice your network with dynamic behavior that
couldn’t be easily constrained to a TensorFlow graph. Especially if you
weren’t strong programming with common parallel primitives. Eager execution
has made this easier, but it’s still more cumbersome than PyTorch’s execution
methodology.

PyTorch sacrifices many of the benefits of compilation for usability and this
is most obvious when deploying to, for example, the cloud or mobile devices.
PyTorch, also, inexplicably, breaks many of the conventions present in the
scientific Python ecosystem making it pretty cumbersome to integrate into
existing workflows that rely on a package like scikit-image.

It’s complicated. In fact, I believe it’s way too complicated. Thankfully
Keras solves most problems for most people in this area.

~~~
buildbot
That breaking of compatibility is why I often recommend Chainer [1] over
Pytorch, as one of the back ends to Chainer is literally numpy. Plus, Chainer
is very fast and easy to work with.

[1] [https://chainer.org](https://chainer.org)

~~~
Q6T46nT668w6i3m
Yes! It was a mistake not to mention Chainer since it’s an exceptional
package. Honestly, it presently fulfills the PyTorch mission better than
PyTorch!

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pixelHD
I've had to use both pytorch and tensorflow for various purposes, and i felt
pytorch was more pythonic. In the end, you can use either to implement an
architecture, but I liked pytorch quite a bit.

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nicodjimenez
Congrats to the PyTorch team!

These guys are doing wonderful work, have wonderful taste, and care deeply
about their users.

Big fan!

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orf
Is there a tensorflow serving equivalent for pytorch?

~~~
maybelater
I have a naive question. What is the tensorflow serving service?

~~~
opwieurposiu
Lets you take a model you have trained and run it as a web service.

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amelius
They make it sound as if Facebook owns PyTorch, which is not the case afaik.

~~~
libso
They are the creator of pytorch and have a team dedicated to drive its
development. They implicitly own it.

~~~
amelius
I didn't know that. Strange that this isn't mentioned on PyTorch's website
home page.

~~~
libso
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PyTorch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PyTorch)

Based on Torch initially developed by now VP AI @ Nvida.

For some reason they don't tend to publicize much directly. I have observed
that with other initiatives they have taken up.

E.g. atscale conference. No mention of FB on their about page.

~~~
transpy
Damage control?

------
moneil971
Watching the livestream now, looks pretty impressive

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jph00
PyTorch 1.0 is just fantastic. A shameless plug: we (fast.ai) are also
releasing fastai 1.0 for PyTorch today. fastai makes a lot of stuff in PyTorch
easier to use, whilst allowing full customization with PyTorch code.

[http://www.fast.ai/2018/10/02/fastai-
ai/](http://www.fast.ai/2018/10/02/fastai-ai/)

 _edit: just noticed someone has posted the above link to HN and it 's on the
front page, so I guess follow-ups should go there instead
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18123587](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18123587)
_

~~~
corporateslaver
Fast.ai marketing in every single ml article

~~~
dang
Can you please stop posting this? If you'd please stop posting unsubstantive
and/or uncivil comments generally, we'd appreciate it.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

