What is PyTorch?
PyTorch is an open-source deep-learning library originally developed by Meta AI and now governed by the PyTorch Foundation under the Linux Foundation umbrella. It offers a Pythonic, imperative interface with dynamic computation graphs that make research prototyping fast and intuitive.
Key capabilities
- Tensors & Autograd – NumPy-like tensors with GPU acceleration and a tape-based automatic-differentiation engine.
- TorchScript & TorchDynamo – Tools to turn eager Python code into optimized graphs for production workflows, introduced with PyTorch 2.0 for up-to-2× speed-ups.
- Distributed & Accelerated Training – Native primitives for data-parallel and model-parallel training across multiple GPUs or nodes, plus seamless CUDA/ROCm support.
- Rich Ecosystem – Hundreds of domain libraries (TorchVision, TorchAudio, TorchText, PyTorch Lightning, etc.) and community projects for vision, NLP, graphs, RL and more.
- Production-ready Serving – TorchServe, ONNX export, mobile runtimes and integrations with every major cloud platform.
Adoption & Governance
PyTorch powers research and production systems at organisations such as Tesla, Uber and Salesforce, and underpins open-source projects like Hugging Face Transformers. It is released under the BSD-3-Clause license and stewarded by the PyTorch Foundation, ensuring vendor-neutral governance and a vibrant contributor community.
