Meta releases PyTorch Live for creating mobile ML demos ‘in minutes’

2021/12/02 Innoverview Read

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.

Introducing @PyTorchLive, an easy to use library of tools for creating on-device ML demos on Android and iOS. With Live, you can build a working mobile app ML demo in minutes. Learn more at https://t.co/6yv9zwBDth and post your demo with #PyTorchLive. pic.twitter.com/hnOlB9E00r

— PyTorch (@PyTorch) December 1, 2021

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:

MetInfo enterprise content manager system | MetInfo CMS

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.

(Source: AI News Meta releases PyTorch Live for creating mobile ML demos ‘in minutes’ (artificialintelligence-news.com)