Meta has announced PyTorch Live, a library of tools designed to make it easy to create on-device mobile ML demos “in minutes”.
PyTorch Live was unveiled during PyTorch Developer Day and enables anyone to build mobile ML demo apps using JavaScript, the world’s most popular programming language.
While on-device AI demos cannot currently be shared, Meta says that functionality is on the way. Developers can start building custom machine learning models to later share with the broader PyTorch community.
PyTorch was publicly launched by Meta back in January 2017, when the company was still known as Facebook. The open-source machine learning library quickly became a firm favourite among the developer and data science communities.
As the PyTorch name suggests, the main library’s interface is designed around Python but it also has a C++ interface.
The once-dominant machine learning library, TensorFlow, had a two-year headstart on PyTorch but has been falling behind in usage in recent years.
In 2018, GitHub’s Octoverse report highlighted the growth of PyTorch as an open-source project outpacing that of TensorFlow. PyTorch grew by 2.8x that year compared to TensorFlow’s still not insubstantial 1.8x.
That edge for PyTorch appears to be eating into TensorFlow’s early mover advantage.
TensorFlow appeared in three times more job listings in Indeed, Monster, SimplyHired, and LinkedIn as PyTorch in April 2019. However, TensorFlow’s edge in job-listing mentions dropped to 2x in 2020.
Over the past year, PyTorch has also overtaken TensorFlow in worldwide Google searches:
PyTorch Live looks set to accelerate the success of the machine learning library. The tools use React Native for building cross-platform visual user interfaces and PyTorch Mobile powers on-device inference.
Anyone wanting to get started with PyTorch Live can do so through its command-line interface setup and/or its data processing API.
(Image Credit: Meta)
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