Facebook launches PyTorch 1.0, new open-source AI framework for developers

The “PyTorch 1.0” toolkit will be available in beta within the next few months

Facebook bets big on Artificial Intelligence (REUTERS)

After making deep investments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, Facebook has announced the next version of its open-source AI framework for developers. Called "PyTorch 1.0", the framework provides everyone in the AI research community with a fast, seamless path for building a broad range of AI projects.

"The technology in PyTorch 1.0 is already being used at scale, including performing nearly 6 billion text translations per day for the 48 most commonly used languages on Facebook," the company announced during its F8 developer conference in San Jose on Wednesday.

The AI research and engineering teams at Facebook have successfully trained an image recognition system on a dataset of 3.5 billion publicly available photos, using the hashtags on those photos in place of human annotations.

"This new technique will allow our researchers to scale their work much more quickly, and they've already used it to score a record-high 85.4 per cent accuracy on the widely used 'ImageNet' benchmark," Facebook said.

The "PyTorch 1.0" toolkit will be available in beta within the next few months, making Facebook's state-of-the-art AI research tools available to everyone.

"With it, developers can take advantage of computer vision advances like 'DensePose', which can put a full polygonal mesh overlay on people as they move through a scene- something that will help make AR camera applications more compelling," the company said.