A Brief History of Deep Learning Frameworks

As the success of AlexNet drew great attention in the area of computer vision and reignited the hope of neural networks, large tech companies joined the force of developing deep learning frameworks. Among them, Google open sourced the famous TensorFlow framework that is still the most popular deep learning framework in ML field up to date. The inventor of Caffe joined Facebook and continued the release of Caffe2; at the same time, Facebook AI Research (FAIR) team also released another popular framework PyTorch which was based on the Torch framework but with the more popular Python APIs. Microsoft Research developed the CNTK framework. And Amazon adopted MXNet, a joint academic project from University of Washington, CMU and others.