Europe has emerged as one of the world's leading centres for open-weight AI, with companies including Mistral, Black Forest Labs and Helsing contributing to a growing ecosystem focused on open models and AI sovereignty.
Much of that ecosystem relies on PyTorch, the open source machine learning framework used by the vast majority of organisations training frontier AI models.
Earlier this year, I spoke with Mark Collier, Executive Director, PyTorch Foundation, at the PyTorch Paris conference.
From Meta project to neutral foundation
PyTorch originated at Meta, back when it was still Facebook. It was created as an open source framework to help researchers train deep learning models. Even in its early days, the team recognised that this software was too fundamental to AI research to remain closed. They wanted researchers everywhere to use it, contribute to it and build an ecosystem around it.
