Facebook passes PyTorch for Windows development to Microsoft

Facebook today announced that Microsoft has expanded its participation in PyTorch, the social network's machine learning framework, to take ownership of the development and maintenance of the PyTorch build for Windows. The intent is to bring the experience on Windows in line with other platforms, like Linux; historically, PyTorch on Windows has lagged behind due to a lack of test coverage, a convoluted installation experience, and missing functionality. PyTorch, which Facebook publicly released in January 2017, is an open source machine learning library based on Torch, a scientific computing framework and script language that in turn is based on the Lua programming language. While TensorFlow has been around slightly longer (since November 2015), PyTorch continues to see rapid uptake in the data science and developer community. It claimed one of the top spots for fastest-growing open source projects last year, according to GitHub's 2018 Octoverse report, and Facebook recently revealed that in 2019 the number of contributors to the platform grew more than 50% year-over-year to nearly 1,200.