Amazon Web Services Inc. announced today that it's adding support for PyTorch models with its Amazon Elastic Inference service, which it said will help developers reduce the costs of deep learning inference by as much as 75% in some cases. Amazon Elastic Inference is a service launched in late 2018 that enables customers to attach graphics processing unit-powered inference acceleration to a standard Amazon EC2 instance. Inference refers to the process of making predictions using a trained deep learning model. PyTorch is an open-source machine learning library that was first developed by Facebook Inc. It's used primarily for applications such as computer vision and natural language processing.

In what might only be perceived as a win for Facebook, OpenAI today announced that it will migrate to the social network's PyTorch machine learning framework in future projects, eschewing Google's long-in-the-tooth TensorFlow platform. OpenAI is the San Francisco-based AI research firm cofounded by CTO Greg Brockman, chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, Elon Musk, and others, with backing from luminaries like LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman and former Y Combinator president Sam Altman. In a blog post, the company cited PyTorch's efficiency, scalability, and adoption as the reasons for its decision. "Going forward we'll primarily use PyTorch as our deep learning framework but sometimes use other ones when there's a specific technical reason to do so," said the company in a statement. "We're … excited to be joining a rapidly-growing developer community, including organizations like Facebook and Microsoft, in pushing scale and performance on [graphics cards]." OpenAI says that many of its teams have already migrated their work to PyTorch and that they'll contribute to the PyTorch community in the coming months.