首页人物观点离开 Meta 与 PyTorch 我将在 11 月 17 日正式从 PyTorch 卸任，并离开 Meta。简而言之：我不想一辈子都在做 PyTorch，而我刚结束长假回归、项目又已经能在没有我的情况下稳定运转 —— 这是最完美的离开时机。在 Meta 刚好十一年，几乎占据了我整个职业生涯。结识了许多一辈子的朋友。带领 PyTorch 将近八年，从零做到 AI 行业 90%+ 的采用率。要放下这一切，是我人生中做过的最艰难的决定之一。但我离开时心中满怀。 PyTorch 现在能应对 exascale（百亿亿次级）训练，它支撑着正在重新定义智能的基础模型，它部署在几乎所有顶级 AI 公司中。从 MIT 到印度偏乡的教室里都在使用它。我曾梦想让更多人能用上这些工具？现在他们确实能了。我想降低的门槛？它几乎已经不存在了。当然，要做的事情仍然非常多。只要 AI 以疯狂速度演进，PyTorch 就永远在追赶。但沉迷于未来，有时会让我们忘记自己已经走了多远。对每一位与我一起构建 PyTorch 的人——相信研究应是快乐的，相信工具应该优雅，相信开源能改变一切的人——谢谢你们。这不是我的旅程，而是我们的。我的下一步？做一些小的事情。新的事情。我还无法完全理解的事情。让人不舒服的事情。我本可以在 Meta 转到别的岗位。但我需要知道外面有什么。我需要再次做一些小而新的东西。我无法忍受自己未来会后悔“从未在 Meta 外尝试过别的东西”。离开真的很难。我坐在整个 AI 行业里杠杆最大的位置之一 —— 我领导的软件层驱动着整个产业。所有主要 AI 公司与硬件厂商的负责人都能直接联系我。放弃这种权力，非常不容易。但最后，好奇心赢了。继续让 AI 变得更“好用、更易用”。我会继续关注，也可能继续提 issue，肯定会继续参与。 PyTorch 会好吗？我不想永远做 PyTorch，我也不想像 Guido 或 Linus 那样几十年绑定在一个东西上。去年 11 月，在我女儿出生的同时，我开始与 Aparna 计划离开。我希望在我离开时，PyTorch 处于稳定、良好的状态。到今年 8 月，在我育儿假的后半段，我确信：Edward、Suo、Alban、Greg、John、Joe 和 Jana 已经准备好了。他们面对艰难的人事、产品、技术与组织问题时，不再像过去那样依赖我来解决。他们为 PyTorch 大会打造的产品叙事是连贯的 —— 真正连贯的。我之前标红的问题正在变健康。项目不再需要我了。不同于 2020–2022（那时我为了做机器人离开，后来因为 Lin、Dima 和 Dwarak 离职我又回来），我这次非常确信 PyTorch 的韧性。 PyTorch 价值观最核心的传承者 —— Greg、Alban、Ed、Jason 和 Joe —— 现在都在决策桌边，而 Suo、John 与 Jana 也已加入，是非常契合团队价值观的人。未来若有人离开，也有长长的候补名单愿意坐在那张桌旁。这些让我对团队高度放心。我与 Jana 在过去几个月有过长时间的技术与组织讨论，这让我确信她十分可靠；Suo 是过去两年中我最强的系统构建者与战略伙伴；John 在 Julia 和开源社区耕耘多年（我们在 2015 年还曾一起 hack 过 Torch.jl）。此外，2025 年的产品发布和执行力本身就足以打消任何残余的疑虑。我相信这支 PyTorch 队伍会做得非常好。PyTorch 可能不再完全体现我的个人“品味”，但我确信其价值观会保留下来，产品会继续优秀。我在 Meta 的时光 FAIR 的早期岁月几乎是魔幻的。我身处一个由极其聪明的伙伴组成的小家庭，一起在公开环境下构建最前沿的 AI。从与 Emily Denton、Rob Fergus、Leon Bottou、Martin Arjovsky 以及（现在已经传奇般的）Alec Radford 做 GAN，到和 Gabriel Synnaeve 一起做星际争霸 AI、和 Howard Mansell 建第一代 FAIR 集群、和 Adam Lerer 与 Piotr Dollar 做目标检测，以及后来构建 PyTorch。那段时间是我难以用语言描述的快乐。2015 和 2016 年可能是我这辈子最富有成就感、最享受工作的两年。我大概会永远浪漫化那段记忆。刚加入 FAIR 时，我的冒名顶替综合症非常严重，前三个月异常艰难。Andrew Tulloch 是我最感激的人之一，他体贴、善良、热情的指导让我坚持下来。我极度看好 Meta 的未来，仅仅因为他回来了。我在 PyTorch 的时光我热爱构建它的每一部分——设计、管理、做 PM、做 TL、写文档、做发布工程、杀 bug、做增长、让它成为一个数百人协作的连贯产品、推动它走向产业共同托管……全部。致 Meta 的核心 PyTorch 团队：工程师、研究员、开源维护者、文档作者、CI 基建团队、硬件合作伙伴、社区建设者，以及 Meta 内外数百位共同参与的人——谢谢你们。你们把一个库变成了一场运动。感谢名单太长，但我必须点名这些人： Adam Paszke、Sam Gross、Greg Chanan、Joe Spisak、Alban Desmaison、Edward Yang、Richard Zou、Tongzhou Wang、Francisco Massa、Luca Antiga、Andreas Köpf、Zach DeVito、Zeming Lin、Adam Lerer、Howard Mansell、Natalia Gimelshein，以及 Schrep。还有更多后来变得举足轻重的人：Lu Fang、Xiaodong Wang、Junjie Bai、Nikita Shulga、Horace He、Mark Saroufim、Jason Ansel、Dmytro Dzhulgakov、Yangqing Jia、Geeta Chauhan、Will Constable、Briah Hirsh、Jane Xu、Mario Lezcano、Piotr Balecki、Yinghai Lu、Less Wright、Andrew Tulloch、Bruce Lin、Woo Kim、Helen Suk、Chris Gottbrath、Peng Wu、Joe Isaacson、Eli Uriegas、Tristan Rice、Yanan Cao、Elias Ellison、Animesh Jain、Peter Noordhuis、Tianyu Liu、Yifu Wang、Lin Qiao 等数百人。PyTorch 没有这些人就什么都不是 ❤️。我最快乐的时刻来自与用户面对面：他们分享喜悦、感谢与反馈。我记得 2017 年 NeurIPS，有个研究生声音哽咽地告诉我：他做了三年没有推进的研究，在使用 PyTorch 的三个月内取得了巨大进展，已经准备毕业了。那一刻让我真切意识到，我们做的事对许多人意义深远，即便他们不常发声。我确实怀念 PyTorch 社区那种 300 人大会如同家族聚会的亲密感。但想到如今大会已是 3,000 人规模，促成市场层面的重大合作，也帮助了数量级更多的人做出更好的 AI，这种成长让我无比自豪。致谢致 Mark Zuckerberg 和 Mike Schroepfer —— 你们相信开源是根本重要的，也是可行的商业策略。大多数人难以在商业活动中理解这一点，而我们始终步调一致，不需要多言。没有你们，就没有 FAIR 和 PyTorch。致 Yann LeCun 和 Rob Fergus，感谢你们创造了我无比敬爱的 FAIR 初期文化。致 Aparna Ramani —— 少见的领导者，能同时维持极高的组织标准、技术能力顶尖，可以在同一场谈话中讨论深度基础设施与行业战略，是绝对的执行机器。我从你身上学到了很多。致 Santosh、Kaushik、Delia、Oldham 和 Ben —— 感谢你们让 Infra 成为我的另一个家。感谢所有支持过我的经理们 —— Serkan、Howard、Jerome、Abhijit、Yoram、Joelle、Aparna 和 Damien —— 我欠你们一辈子的酒。暂别。 ——Soumith Leaving Meta and PyTorch I'm stepping down from PyTorch and leaving Meta on November 17th. tl;dr: Didn't want to be doing PyTorch forever, seemed like the perfect time to transition right after I got back from a long leave and the project built itself around me. Eleven years at Meta. Nearly all my professional life. Making many friends for life. Almost eight years leading PyTorch, taking it from nothing to 90%+ adoption in AI. Walking away from this was one of the hardest things I've ever done. But I'm leaving with a full heart. PyTorch handles exascale training now. It powers foundation models that are redefining intelligence. It's in production at virtually every major AI company. It's taught in classrooms from MIT to rural India. The tools I dreamed about making accessible? They are. The barrier to entry I wanted to lower? It's almost gone. To be clear, there’s so much more to do. As long as AI evolves at a breakneck pace, PyTorch will continue to play catch up. Obsessing over the yet-to-come sometimes makes us forget how much we’ve already done. To everyone who built this with me—who believed research should be joyful, that tools should be elegant, that open source changes everything—thank you. This wasn't my journey. It was ours. What's next for me? Something small. Something new. Something I don't fully understand yet. Something uncomfortable. I could have moved to something else inside Meta. But I needed to know what's out there. I needed to do something small again. I couldn't live with the counterfactual regret of never trying something outside Meta. It's very hard to leave. I probably have one of the AI industry’s most leveraged seats, I lead the software layer that powers the entire AI industry. Every major AI company and hardware vendor are on a speed dial. This kind of power is really hard to give up. But curiosity ultimately won out in my head. Keep making AI delicious and accessible. I'll be watching. Probably filing issues. Definitely staying involved. Is PyTorch going to be okay? I don't want to be doing PyTorch forever. I don't want to be like Guido or Linus— bound to a single thing for decades. Last November, coinciding with the birth of my daughter, I started planning my exit with Aparna. My goal was to leave PyTorch in a good and stable place. By this August, during the second half of my parental leave, I knew: Edward, Suo, Alban, Greg, John, Joe and Jana were ready. The team faced hard people, product, technical and organizational problems and didn’t feel the need to lean back on me to solve these for them (unlike in the past). The product story they crafted for the PyTorch Conference was coherent—really coherent. The things I'd flagged red were turning healthy. The project didn't need me anymore. Unlike 2020-2022 (when I stepped down to go do robotics and came back when Lin, Dima and Dwarak left), I have strong confidence that this time PyTorch is truly resilient. The most aligned culture carriers of PyTorch – Greg, Alban, Ed, Jason and Joe are at the decision table now, and people with strong value alignment – Suo, John and Jana have joined them at the table. And there’s a long list of equally value-aligned people willing to sit at the table should any of these people leave. There are many little things that make up my confidence on the people – John worked on Julia and open-source for a very long time (in fact we hacked a Torch.jl in 2015), Suo has been the strongest systems builder and strategic partner I’ve had for the past two years, and Jana worked on resilient core systems for a very long time, I’ve had long technical and organizational discussions with her over the past few months that give me confidence. And the product lineup and execution in 2025 should be sufficient evidence for any remaining doubt. I’m confident that this band of PyTorchers are going to do exceptionally well. PyTorch might change in flavor because I no longer impose my own taste from the top, but I’m confident that the values are going to stay intact and the product is going to be awesome. My time at Meta The early years of FAIR were absolutely magical. I was part of a small family of absolutely brilliant people building state-of-the-art AI out in the open. From working on GANs with Emily Denton, Rob Fergus, Leon Bottou, Martin Arjovsky and the (now legendary) Alec Radford to building Starcraft bots with Gabriel Synnaeve, to building the first FAIR Cluster with Howard Mansell, to working on object detection with Adam Lerer and Piotr Dollar, to building PyTorch. It was more fun than I can describe in words. 2015 and 2016 were probably the most productive and professionally enjoyable years of my life. I’ll probably romanticize this period of my life forever. When I joined FAIR, I had massive impostor syndrome, and the first 3 months were very very difficult. I can’t credit Andrew Tulloch enough for being the most thoughtful, kind and welcoming mentor, without whom I wouldn’t have made it. I’m so damn bullish for Meta just from the fact that he’s back. --- My time on PyTorch was special. I loved every part of building it—designing it, managing it, being the PM, TL, comms lead, doc engineer, release engineer, squashing bugs, growth hacking, turning it into a coherent product with hundreds of people, transitioning it to industry stakeholdership – the whole nine yards. To the core PyTorch team at Meta: the engineers, researchers, open-source maintainers, docs writers, CI infrastructure folks, hardware partners, the community builders. To the hundreds more inside and outside Meta—thank you. You turned a library into a movement. There are too many people to credit and thank, but I can't not mention Adam Paszke, Sam Gross, Greg Chanan, Joe Spisak, Alban Desmaison, Edward Yang, Richard Zou, Tongzhou Wang, Francisco Massa, Luca Antiga, Andreas Köpf, Zach DeVito, Zeming Lin, Adam Lerer, Howard Mansell and Natalia Gimelshein. And Schrep. They made the launch happen. And so many more people became centrally important later: Lu Fang, Xiaodong Wang, Junjie Bai, Nikita Shulga, Horace He, Mark Saroufim, Jason Ansel, Dmytro Dzhulgakov, Yangqing Jia, Geeta Chauhan, Will Constable, Briah Hirsh, Jane Xu, Mario Lezcano, Piotr Balecki, Yinghai Lu, Less Wright, Andrew Tulloch, Bruce Lin, Woo Kim, Helen Suk, Chris Gottbrath, Peng Wu, Joe Isaacson, Eli Uriegas, Tristan Rice, Yanan Cao, Elias Ellison, Animesh Jain, Peter Noordhuis, Tianyu Liu, Yifu Wang, Lin Qiao and hundreds more. It’s criminal of me to not take the space to list out everyone else I should be mentioning here. PyTorch is nothing without its people ❤️. The most joyful moments of building PyTorch was meeting users eager to share their happiness, love and feedback. I remember a grad student coming to me at Neurips 2017, in a slurring emotional voice he said he’d been trying to make progress on his research for 3 years but within 3 months of using PyTorch he made so much progress that he was ready to graduate. That moment made it tangible that what we do matters, a lot, to a lot of people, even if you don't constantly hear from them. I do miss the intimacy of the PyTorch community, with a 300 person conference that felt like an extended family gathering, but I feel that’s a small price to pay considering the scale of impact PyTorch is truly having today – yes the Conference is now 3,000 people where market-moving deals get brokered, but it’s helping orders of magnitude more people to do their best AI work. I miss the intimacy, but I'm proud of that growth. --- To Mark Zuckerberg and Mike Schroepfer, who believed that open-sourcing is fundamentally important and is a sound business strategy. This is so hard to understand for most people within the course of business, but we’ve run lock-step on this strategy without ever having to discuss it. Without you two, neither FAIR nor PyTorch would’ve happened. And those mean so much to me. To Yann LeCun and Rob Fergus, for building the magical early FAIR that I so revere. To Aparna Ramani, a leader that I find so rare at Meta in her ability to hold a really high bar for the org, technically brilliant with the span to discuss deep infra systems and industry-strategy within the same conversation and for being an absolute execution-machine! I’ve learned so much from you. To Santosh, Kaushik, Delia, Oldham and Ben for being so welcoming to Infra. For someone coming over from FAIR with a wildly different culture, you all made me feel at home and made me part of the family, and thank you for that. To all my managers who've championed me through the PSC video game – Serkan, Howard, Jerome, Abhijit, Yoram, Joelle, Aparna and Damien – I owe you a lifetime of drinks. Signing off for now. —Soumith

离开 Meta 与 PyTorch 我将在 11 月 17 日正式从 PyTorch 卸任，并离开 Meta。简而言之：我不想一辈子都在做 PyTorch，而我刚结束长假回归、项目又已经能在没有我的情况下稳定运转 —— 这是最完美的离开时机。在 Meta 刚好十一年，几乎占据了我整个职业生涯。结识了许多一辈子的朋友。带领 PyTorch 将近八年，从零做到 AI 行业 90%+ 的采用率。要放下这一切，是我人生中做过的最艰难的决定之一。但我离开时心中满怀。 PyTorch 现在能应对 exascale（百亿亿次级）训练，它支撑着正在重新定义智能的基础模型，它部署在几乎所有顶级 AI 公司中。从 MIT 到印度偏乡的教室里都在使用它。我曾梦想让更多人能用上这些工具？现在他们确实能了。我想降低的门槛？它几乎已经不存在了。当然，要做的事情仍然非常多。只要 AI 以疯狂速度演进，PyTorch 就永远在追赶。但沉迷于未来，有时会让我们忘记自己已经走了多远。对每一位与我一起构建 PyTorch 的人——相信研究应是快乐的，相信工具应该优雅，相信开源能改变一切的人——谢谢你们。这不是我的旅程，而是我们的。我的下一步？做一些小的事情。新的事情。我还无法完全理解的事情。让人不舒服的事情。我本可以在 Meta 转到别的岗位。但我需要知道外面有什么。我需要再次做一些小而新的东西。我无法忍受自己未来会后悔“从未在 Meta 外尝试过别的东西”。离开真的很难。我坐在整个 AI 行业里杠杆最大的位置之一 —— 我领导的软件层驱动着整个产业。所有主要 AI 公司与硬件厂商的负责人都能直接联系我。放弃这种权力，非常不容易。但最后，好奇心赢了。继续让 AI 变得更“好用、更易用”。我会继续关注，也可能继续提 issue，肯定会继续参与。 PyTorch 会好吗？我不想永远做 PyTorch，我也不想像 Guido 或 Linus 那样几十年绑定在一个东西上。去年 11 月，在我女儿出生的同时，我开始与 Aparna 计划离开。我希望在我离开时，PyTorch 处于稳定、良好的状态。到今年 8 月，在我育儿假的后半段，我确信：Edward、Suo、Alban、Greg、John、Joe 和 Jana 已经准备好了。他们面对艰难的人事、产品、技术与组织问题时，不再像过去那样依赖我来解决。他们为 PyTorch 大会打造的产品叙事是连贯的 —— 真正连贯的。我之前标红的问题正在变健康。项目不再需要我了。不同于 2020–2022（那时我为了做机器人离开，后来因为 Lin、Dima 和 Dwarak 离职我又回来），我这次非常确信 PyTorch 的韧性。 PyTorch 价值观最核心的传承者 —— Greg、Alban、Ed、Jason 和 Joe —— 现在都在决策桌边，而 Suo、John 与 Jana 也已加入，是非常契合团队价值观的人。未来若有人离开，也有长长的候补名单愿意坐在那张桌旁。这些让我对团队高度放心。我与 Jana 在过去几个月有过长时间的技术与组织讨论，这让我确信她十分可靠；Suo 是过去两年中我最强的系统构建者与战略伙伴；John 在 Julia 和开源社区耕耘多年（我们在 2015 年还曾一起 hack 过 Torch.jl）。此外，2025 年的产品发布和执行力本身就足以打消任何残余的疑虑。我相信这支 PyTorch 队伍会做得非常好。PyTorch 可能不再完全体现我的个人“品味”，但我确信其价值观会保留下来，产品会继续优秀。我在 Meta 的时光 FAIR 的早期岁月几乎是魔幻的。我身处一个由极其聪明的伙伴组成的小家庭，一起在公开环境下构建最前沿的 AI。从与 Emily Denton、Rob Fergus、Leon Bottou、Martin Arjovsky 以及（现在已经传奇般的）Alec Radford 做 GAN，到和 Gabriel Synnaeve 一起做星际争霸 AI、和 Howard Mansell 建第一代 FAIR 集群、和 Adam Lerer 与 Piotr Dollar 做目标检测，以及后来构建 PyTorch。那段时间是我难以用语言描述的快乐。2015 和 2016 年可能是我这辈子最富有成就感、最享受工作的两年。我大概会永远浪漫化那段记忆。刚加入 FAIR 时，我的冒名顶替综合症非常严重，前三个月异常艰难。Andrew Tulloch 是我最感激的人之一，他体贴、善良、热情的指导让我坚持下来。我极度看好 Meta 的未来，仅仅因为他回来了。我在 PyTorch 的时光我热爱构建它的每一部分——设计、管理、做 PM、做 TL、写文档、做发布工程、杀 bug、做增长、让它成为一个数百人协作的连贯产品、推动它走向产业共同托管……全部。致 Meta 的核心 PyTorch 团队：工程师、研究员、开源维护者、文档作者、CI 基建团队、硬件合作伙伴、社区建设者，以及 Meta 内外数百位共同参与的人——谢谢你们。你们把一个库变成了一场运动。感谢名单太长，但我必须点名这些人： Adam Paszke、Sam Gross、Greg Chanan、Joe Spisak、Alban Desmaison、Edward Yang、Richard Zou、Tongzhou Wang、Francisco Massa、Luca Antiga、Andreas Köpf、Zach DeVito、Zeming Lin、Adam Lerer、Howard Mansell、Natalia Gimelshein，以及 Schrep。还有更多后来变得举足轻重的人：Lu Fang、Xiaodong Wang、Junjie Bai、Nikita Shulga、Horace He、Mark Saroufim、Jason Ansel、Dmytro Dzhulgakov、Yangqing Jia、Geeta Chauhan、Will Constable、Briah Hirsh、Jane Xu、Mario Lezcano、Piotr Balecki、Yinghai Lu、Less Wright、Andrew Tulloch、Bruce Lin、Woo Kim、Helen Suk、Chris Gottbrath、Peng Wu、Joe Isaacson、Eli Uriegas、Tristan Rice、Yanan Cao、Elias Ellison、Animesh Jain、Peter Noordhuis、Tianyu Liu、Yifu Wang、Lin Qiao 等数百人。PyTorch 没有这些人就什么都不是 ❤️。我最快乐的时刻来自与用户面对面：他们分享喜悦、感谢与反馈。我记得 2017 年 NeurIPS，有个研究生声音哽咽地告诉我：他做了三年没有推进的研究，在使用 PyTorch 的三个月内取得了巨大进展，已经准备毕业了。那一刻让我真切意识到，我们做的事对许多人意义深远，即便他们不常发声。我确实怀念 PyTorch 社区那种 300 人大会如同家族聚会的亲密感。但想到如今大会已是 3,000 人规模，促成市场层面的重大合作，也帮助了数量级更多的人做出更好的 AI，这种成长让我无比自豪。致谢致 Mark Zuckerberg 和 Mike Schroepfer —— 你们相信开源是根本重要的，也是可行的商业策略。大多数人难以在商业活动中理解这一点，而我们始终步调一致，不需要多言。没有你们，就没有 FAIR 和 PyTorch。致 Yann LeCun 和 Rob Fergus，感谢你们创造了我无比敬爱的 FAIR 初期文化。致 Aparna Ramani —— 少见的领导者，能同时维持极高的组织标准、技术能力顶尖，可以在同一场谈话中讨论深度基础设施与行业战略，是绝对的执行机器。我从你身上学到了很多。致 Santosh、Kaushik、Delia、Oldham 和 Ben —— 感谢你们让 Infra 成为我的另一个家。感谢所有支持过我的经理们 —— Serkan、Howard、Jerome、Abhijit、Yoram、Joelle、Aparna 和 Damien —— 我欠你们一辈子的酒。暂别。 ——Soumith Leaving Meta and PyTorch I'm stepping down from PyTorch and leaving Meta on November 17th. tl;dr: Didn't want to be doing PyTorch forever, seemed like the perfect time to transition right after I got back from a long leave and the project built itself around me. Eleven years at Meta. Nearly all my professional life. Making many friends for life. Almost eight years leading PyTorch, taking it from nothing to 90%+ adoption in AI. Walking away from this was one of the hardest things I've ever done. But I'm leaving with a full heart. PyTorch handles exascale training now. It powers foundation models that are redefining intelligence. It's in production at virtually every major AI company. It's taught in classrooms from MIT to rural India. The tools I dreamed about making accessible? They are. The barrier to entry I wanted to lower? It's almost gone. To be clear, there’s so much more to do. As long as AI evolves at a breakneck pace, PyTorch will continue to play catch up. Obsessing over the yet-to-come sometimes makes us forget how much we’ve already done. To everyone who built this with me—who believed research should be joyful, that tools should be elegant, that open source changes everything—thank you. This wasn't my journey. It was ours. What's next for me? Something small. Something new. Something I don't fully understand yet. Something uncomfortable. I could have moved to something else inside Meta. But I needed to know what's out there. I needed to do something small again. I couldn't live with the counterfactual regret of never trying something outside Meta. It's very hard to leave. I probably have one of the AI industry’s most leveraged seats, I lead the software layer that powers the entire AI industry. Every major AI company and hardware vendor are on a speed dial. This kind of power is really hard to give up. But curiosity ultimately won out in my head. Keep making AI delicious and accessible. I'll be watching. Probably filing issues. Definitely staying involved. Is PyTorch going to be okay? I don't want to be doing PyTorch forever. I don't want to be like Guido or Linus— bound to a single thing for decades. Last November, coinciding with the birth of my daughter, I started planning my exit with Aparna. My goal was to leave PyTorch in a good and stable place. By this August, during the second half of my parental leave, I knew: Edward, Suo, Alban, Greg, John, Joe and Jana were ready. The team faced hard people, product, technical and organizational problems and didn’t feel the need to lean back on me to solve these for them (unlike in the past). The product story they crafted for the PyTorch Conference was coherent—really coherent. The things I'd flagged red were turning healthy. The project didn't need me anymore. Unlike 2020-2022 (when I stepped down to go do robotics and came back when Lin, Dima and Dwarak left), I have strong confidence that this time PyTorch is truly resilient. The most aligned culture carriers of PyTorch – Greg, Alban, Ed, Jason and Joe are at the decision table now, and people with strong value alignment – Suo, John and Jana have joined them at the table. And there’s a long list of equally value-aligned people willing to sit at the table should any of these people leave. There are many little things that make up my confidence on the people – John worked on Julia and open-source for a very long time (in fact we hacked a Torch.jl in 2015), Suo has been the strongest systems builder and strategic partner I’ve had for the past two years, and Jana worked on resilient core systems for a very long time, I’ve had long technical and organizational discussions with her over the past few months that give me confidence. And the product lineup and execution in 2025 should be sufficient evidence for any remaining doubt. I’m confident that this band of PyTorchers are going to do exceptionally well. PyTorch might change in flavor because I no longer impose my own taste from the top, but I’m confident that the values are going to stay intact and the product is going to be awesome. My time at Meta The early years of FAIR were absolutely magical. I was part of a small family of absolutely brilliant people building state-of-the-art AI out in the open. From working on GANs with Emily Denton, Rob Fergus, Leon Bottou, Martin Arjovsky and the (now legendary) Alec Radford to building Starcraft bots with Gabriel Synnaeve, to building the first FAIR Cluster with Howard Mansell, to working on object detection with Adam Lerer and Piotr Dollar, to building PyTorch. It was more fun than I can describe in words. 2015 and 2016 were probably the most productive and professionally enjoyable years of my life. I’ll probably romanticize this period of my life forever. When I joined FAIR, I had massive impostor syndrome, and the first 3 months were very very difficult. I can’t credit Andrew Tulloch enough for being the most thoughtful, kind and welcoming mentor, without whom I wouldn’t have made it. I’m so damn bullish for Meta just from the fact that he’s back. --- My time on PyTorch was special. I loved every part of building it—designing it, managing it, being the PM, TL, comms lead, doc engineer, release engineer, squashing bugs, growth hacking, turning it into a coherent product with hundreds of people, transitioning it to industry stakeholdership – the whole nine yards. To the core PyTorch team at Meta: the engineers, researchers, open-source maintainers, docs writers, CI infrastructure folks, hardware partners, the community builders. To the hundreds more inside and outside Meta—thank you. You turned a library into a movement. There are too many people to credit and thank, but I can't not mention Adam Paszke, Sam Gross, Greg Chanan, Joe Spisak, Alban Desmaison, Edward Yang, Richard Zou, Tongzhou Wang, Francisco Massa, Luca Antiga, Andreas Köpf, Zach DeVito, Zeming Lin, Adam Lerer, Howard Mansell and Natalia Gimelshein. And Schrep. They made the launch happen. And so many more people became centrally important later: Lu Fang, Xiaodong Wang, Junjie Bai, Nikita Shulga, Horace He, Mark Saroufim, Jason Ansel, Dmytro Dzhulgakov, Yangqing Jia, Geeta Chauhan, Will Constable, Briah Hirsh, Jane Xu, Mario Lezcano, Piotr Balecki, Yinghai Lu, Less Wright, Andrew Tulloch, Bruce Lin, Woo Kim, Helen Suk, Chris Gottbrath, Peng Wu, Joe Isaacson, Eli Uriegas, Tristan Rice, Yanan Cao, Elias Ellison, Animesh Jain, Peter Noordhuis, Tianyu Liu, Yifu Wang, Lin Qiao and hundreds more. It’s criminal of me to not take the space to list out everyone else I should be mentioning here. PyTorch is nothing without its people ❤️. The most joyful moments of building PyTorch was meeting users eager to share their happiness, love and feedback. I remember a grad student coming to me at Neurips 2017, in a slurring emotional voice he said he’d been trying to make progress on his research for 3 years but within 3 months of using PyTorch he made so much progress that he was ready to graduate. That moment made it tangible that what we do matters, a lot, to a lot of people, even if you don't constantly hear from them. I do miss the intimacy of the PyTorch community, with a 300 person conference that felt like an extended family gathering, but I feel that’s a small price to pay considering the scale of impact PyTorch is truly having today – yes the Conference is now 3,000 people where market-moving deals get brokered, but it’s helping orders of magnitude more people to do their best AI work. I miss the intimacy, but I'm proud of that growth. --- To Mark Zuckerberg and Mike Schroepfer, who believed that open-sourcing is fundamentally important and is a sound business strategy. This is so hard to understand for most people within the course of business, but we’ve run lock-step on this strategy without ever having to discuss it. Without you two, neither FAIR nor PyTorch would’ve happened. And those mean so much to me. To Yann LeCun and Rob Fergus, for building the magical early FAIR that I so revere. To Aparna Ramani, a leader that I find so rare at Meta in her ability to hold a really high bar for the org, technically brilliant with the span to discuss deep infra systems and industry-strategy within the same conversation and for being an absolute execution-machine! I’ve learned so much from you. To Santosh, Kaushik, Delia, Oldham and Ben for being so welcoming to Infra. For someone coming over from FAIR with a wildly different culture, you all made me feel at home and made me part of the family, and thank you for that. To all my managers who've championed me through the PSC video game – Serkan, Howard, Jerome, Abhijit, Yoram, Joelle, Aparna and Damien – I owe you a lifetime of drinks. Signing off for now. —Soumith

Soumith ChintalaCo-founder & Lead of PyTorch, Meta

2025/11/14 06:06 UTC

观点原文

离开 Meta 与 PyTorch

我将在 11 月 17 日正式从 PyTorch 卸任，并离开 Meta。

简而言之：

我不想一辈子都在做 PyTorch，而我刚结束长假回归、项目又已经能在没有我的情况下稳定运转 —— 这是最完美的离开时机。

在 Meta 刚好十一年，几乎占据了我整个职业生涯。结识了许多一辈子的朋友。带领 PyTorch 将近八年，从零做到 AI 行业 90%+ 的采用率。要放下这一切，是我人生中做过的最艰难的决定之一。但我离开时心中满怀。

PyTorch 现在能应对 exascale（百亿亿次级）训练，它支撑着正在重新定义智能的基础模型，它部署在几乎所有顶级 AI 公司中。从 MIT 到印度偏乡的教室里都在使用它。我曾梦想让更多人能用上这些工具？现在他们确实能了。我想降低的门槛？它几乎已经不存在了。

当然，要做的事情仍然非常多。只要 AI 以疯狂速度演进，PyTorch 就永远在追赶。但沉迷于未来，有时会让我们忘记自己已经走了多远。

对每一位与我一起构建 PyTorch 的人——相信研究应是快乐的，相信工具应该优雅，相信开源能改变一切的人——谢谢你们。这不是我的旅程，而是我们的。

我的下一步？

做一些小的事情。新的事情。我还无法完全理解的事情。让人不舒服的事情。

我本可以在 Meta 转到别的岗位。但我需要知道外面有什么。我需要再次做一些小而新的东西。我无法忍受自己未来会后悔“从未在 Meta 外尝试过别的东西”。

离开真的很难。我坐在整个 AI 行业里杠杆最大的位置之一 —— 我领导的软件层驱动着整个产业。所有主要 AI 公司与硬件厂商的负责人都能直接联系我。放弃这种权力，非常不容易。但最后，好奇心赢了。

继续让 AI 变得更“好用、更易用”。我会继续关注，也可能继续提 issue，肯定会继续参与。

PyTorch 会好吗？

我不想永远做 PyTorch，我也不想像 Guido 或 Linus 那样几十年绑定在一个东西上。

去年 11 月，在我女儿出生的同时，我开始与 Aparna 计划离开。我希望在我离开时，PyTorch 处于稳定、良好的状态。

到今年 8 月，在我育儿假的后半段，我确信：Edward、Suo、Alban、Greg、John、Joe 和 Jana 已经准备好了。

他们面对艰难的人事、产品、技术与组织问题时，不再像过去那样依赖我来解决。他们为 PyTorch 大会打造的产品叙事是连贯的 —— 真正连贯的。我之前标红的问题正在变健康。

项目不再需要我了。

不同于 2020–2022（那时我为了做机器人离开，后来因为 Lin、Dima 和 Dwarak 离职我又回来），我这次非常确信 PyTorch 的韧性。

PyTorch 价值观最核心的传承者 —— Greg、Alban、Ed、Jason 和 Joe —— 现在都在决策桌边，而 Suo、John 与 Jana 也已加入，是非常契合团队价值观的人。未来若有人离开，也有长长的候补名单愿意坐在那张桌旁。

这些让我对团队高度放心。我与 Jana 在过去几个月有过长时间的技术与组织讨论，这让我确信她十分可靠；Suo 是过去两年中我最强的系统构建者与战略伙伴；John 在 Julia 和开源社区耕耘多年（我们在 2015 年还曾一起 hack 过 Torch.jl）。此外，2025 年的产品发布和执行力本身就足以打消任何残余的疑虑。

我相信这支 PyTorch 队伍会做得非常好。PyTorch 可能不再完全体现我的个人“品味”，但我确信其价值观会保留下来，产品会继续优秀。

我在 Meta 的时光

FAIR 的早期岁月几乎是魔幻的。我身处一个由极其聪明的伙伴组成的小家庭，一起在公开环境下构建最前沿的 AI。从与 Emily Denton、Rob Fergus、Leon Bottou、Martin Arjovsky 以及（现在已经传奇般的）Alec Radford 做 GAN，到和 Gabriel Synnaeve 一起做星际争霸 AI、和 Howard Mansell 建第一代 FAIR 集群、和 Adam Lerer 与 Piotr Dollar 做目标检测，以及后来构建 PyTorch。

那段时间是我难以用语言描述的快乐。2015 和 2016 年可能是我这辈子最富有成就感、最享受工作的两年。我大概会永远浪漫化那段记忆。

刚加入 FAIR 时，我的冒名顶替综合症非常严重，前三个月异常艰难。Andrew Tulloch 是我最感激的人之一，他体贴、善良、热情的指导让我坚持下来。我极度看好 Meta 的未来，仅仅因为他回来了。

我在 PyTorch 的时光

我热爱构建它的每一部分——设计、管理、做 PM、做 TL、写文档、做发布工程、杀 bug、做增长、让它成为一个数百人协作的连贯产品、推动它走向产业共同托管……全部。

致 Meta 的核心 PyTorch 团队：工程师、研究员、开源维护者、文档作者、CI 基建团队、硬件合作伙伴、社区建设者，以及 Meta 内外数百位共同参与的人——谢谢你们。你们把一个库变成了一场运动。

感谢名单太长，但我必须点名这些人：

Adam Paszke、Sam Gross、Greg Chanan、Joe Spisak、Alban Desmaison、Edward Yang、Richard Zou、Tongzhou Wang、Francisco Massa、Luca Antiga、Andreas Köpf、Zach DeVito、Zeming Lin、Adam Lerer、Howard Mansell、Natalia Gimelshein，以及 Schrep。

还有更多后来变得举足轻重的人：Lu Fang、Xiaodong Wang、Junjie Bai、Nikita Shulga、Horace He、Mark Saroufim、Jason Ansel、Dmytro Dzhulgakov、Yangqing Jia、Geeta Chauhan、Will Constable、Briah Hirsh、Jane Xu、Mario Lezcano、Piotr Balecki、Yinghai Lu、Less Wright、Andrew Tulloch、Bruce Lin、Woo Kim、Helen Suk、Chris Gottbrath、Peng Wu、Joe Isaacson、Eli Uriegas、Tristan Rice、Yanan Cao、Elias Ellison、Animesh Jain、Peter Noordhuis、Tianyu Liu、Yifu Wang、Lin Qiao 等数百人。PyTorch 没有这些人就什么都不是 ❤️。

我最快乐的时刻来自与用户面对面：他们分享喜悦、感谢与反馈。我记得 2017 年 NeurIPS，有个研究生声音哽咽地告诉我：他做了三年没有推进的研究，在使用 PyTorch 的三个月内取得了巨大进展，已经准备毕业了。那一刻让我真切意识到，我们做的事对许多人意义深远，即便他们不常发声。

我确实怀念 PyTorch 社区那种 300 人大会如同家族聚会的亲密感。但想到如今大会已是 3,000 人规模，促成市场层面的重大合作，也帮助了数量级更多的人做出更好的 AI，这种成长让我无比自豪。

致谢

致 Mark Zuckerberg 和 Mike Schroepfer —— 你们相信开源是根本重要的，也是可行的商业策略。大多数人难以在商业活动中理解这一点，而我们始终步调一致，不需要多言。没有你们，就没有 FAIR 和 PyTorch。

致 Yann LeCun 和 Rob Fergus，感谢你们创造了我无比敬爱的 FAIR 初期文化。

致 Aparna Ramani —— 少见的领导者，能同时维持极高的组织标准、技术能力顶尖，可以在同一场谈话中讨论深度基础设施与行业战略，是绝对的执行机器。我从你身上学到了很多。

致 Santosh、Kaushik、Delia、Oldham 和 Ben —— 感谢你们让 Infra 成为我的另一个家。

感谢所有支持过我的经理们 —— Serkan、Howard、Jerome、Abhijit、Yoram、Joelle、Aparna 和 Damien —— 我欠你们一辈子的酒。

暂别。

——Soumith

Leaving Meta and PyTorch

I'm stepping down from PyTorch and leaving Meta on November 17th.

tl;dr: Didn't want to be doing PyTorch forever, seemed like the perfect time to transition right after I got back from a long leave and the project built itself around me.

Eleven years at Meta. Nearly all my professional life. Making many friends for life. Almost eight years leading PyTorch, taking it from nothing to 90%+ adoption in AI. Walking away from this was one of the hardest things I've ever done. But I'm leaving with a full heart.

PyTorch handles exascale training now. It powers foundation models that are redefining intelligence. It's in production at virtually every major AI company. It's taught in classrooms from MIT to rural India. The tools I dreamed about making accessible? They are. The barrier to entry I wanted to lower? It's almost gone.

To be clear, there’s so much more to do. As long as AI evolves at a breakneck pace, PyTorch will continue to play catch up. Obsessing over the yet-to-come sometimes makes us forget how much we’ve already done.

To everyone who built this with me—who believed research should be joyful, that tools should be elegant, that open source changes everything—thank you. This wasn't my journey. It was ours.

What's next for me? Something small. Something new. Something I don't fully understand yet. Something uncomfortable. I could have moved to something else inside Meta. But I needed to know what's out there. I needed to do something small again. I couldn't live with the counterfactual regret of never trying something outside Meta.

It's very hard to leave. I probably have one of the AI industry’s most leveraged seats, I lead the software layer that powers the entire AI industry. Every major AI company and hardware vendor are on a speed dial. This kind of power is really hard to give up. But curiosity ultimately won out in my head.

Keep making AI delicious and accessible. I'll be watching. Probably filing issues. Definitely staying involved.

Is PyTorch going to be okay?

I don't want to be doing PyTorch forever. I don't want to be like Guido or Linus— bound to a single thing for decades. Last November, coinciding with the birth of my daughter, I started planning my exit with Aparna. My goal was to leave PyTorch in a good and stable place.

By this August, during the second half of my parental leave, I knew: Edward, Suo, Alban, Greg, John, Joe and Jana were ready. The team faced hard people, product, technical and organizational problems and didn’t feel the need to lean back on me to solve these for them (unlike in the past). The product story they crafted for the PyTorch Conference was coherent—really coherent. The things I'd flagged red were turning healthy. The project didn't need me anymore. Unlike 2020-2022 (when I stepped down to go do robotics and came back when Lin, Dima and Dwarak left), I have strong confidence that this time PyTorch is truly resilient. The most aligned culture carriers of PyTorch – Greg, Alban, Ed, Jason and Joe are at the decision table now, and people with strong value alignment – Suo, John and Jana have joined them at the table. And there’s a long list of equally value-aligned people willing to sit at the table should any of these people leave. There are many little things that make up my confidence on the people – John worked on Julia and open-source for a very long time (in fact we hacked a Torch.jl in 2015), Suo has been the strongest systems builder and strategic partner I’ve had for the past two years, and Jana worked on resilient core systems for a very long time, I’ve had long technical and organizational discussions with her over the past few months that give me confidence. And the product lineup and execution in 2025 should be sufficient evidence for any remaining doubt.

I’m confident that this band of PyTorchers are going to do exceptionally well. PyTorch might change in flavor because I no longer impose my own taste from the top, but I’m confident that the values are going to stay intact and the product is going to be awesome.

My time at Meta

The early years of FAIR were absolutely magical. I was part of a small family of absolutely brilliant people building state-of-the-art AI out in the open. From working on GANs with Emily Denton, Rob Fergus, Leon Bottou, Martin Arjovsky and the (now legendary) Alec Radford to building Starcraft bots with Gabriel Synnaeve, to building the first FAIR Cluster with Howard Mansell, to working on object detection with Adam Lerer and Piotr Dollar, to building PyTorch. It was more fun than I can describe in words. 2015 and 2016 were probably the most productive and professionally enjoyable years of my life. I’ll probably romanticize this period of my life forever.

When I joined FAIR, I had massive impostor syndrome, and the first 3 months were very very difficult. I can’t credit Andrew Tulloch enough for being the most thoughtful, kind and welcoming mentor, without whom I wouldn’t have made it. I’m so damn bullish for Meta just from the fact that he’s back.

My time on PyTorch was special.

I loved every part of building it—designing it, managing it, being the PM, TL, comms lead, doc engineer, release engineer, squashing bugs, growth hacking, turning it into a coherent product with hundreds of people, transitioning it to industry stakeholdership – the whole nine yards.

To the core PyTorch team at Meta: the engineers, researchers, open-source maintainers, docs writers, CI infrastructure folks, hardware partners, the community builders. To the hundreds more inside and outside Meta—thank you. You turned a library into a movement.

There are too many people to credit and thank, but I can't not mention Adam Paszke, Sam Gross, Greg Chanan, Joe Spisak, Alban Desmaison, Edward Yang, Richard Zou, Tongzhou Wang, Francisco Massa, Luca Antiga, Andreas Köpf, Zach DeVito, Zeming Lin, Adam Lerer, Howard Mansell and Natalia Gimelshein. And Schrep. They made the launch happen. And so many more people became centrally important later: Lu Fang, Xiaodong Wang, Junjie Bai, Nikita Shulga, Horace He, Mark Saroufim, Jason Ansel, Dmytro Dzhulgakov, Yangqing Jia, Geeta Chauhan, Will Constable, Briah Hirsh, Jane Xu, Mario Lezcano, Piotr Balecki, Yinghai Lu, Less Wright, Andrew Tulloch, Bruce Lin, Woo Kim, Helen Suk, Chris Gottbrath, Peng Wu, Joe Isaacson, Eli Uriegas, Tristan Rice, Yanan Cao, Elias Ellison, Animesh Jain, Peter Noordhuis, Tianyu Liu, Yifu Wang, Lin Qiao and hundreds more. It’s criminal of me to not take the space to list out everyone else I should be mentioning here. PyTorch is nothing without its people ❤️.

The most joyful moments of building PyTorch was meeting users eager to share their happiness, love and feedback. I remember a grad student coming to me at Neurips 2017, in a slurring emotional voice he said he’d been trying to make progress on his research for 3 years but within 3 months of using PyTorch he made so much progress that he was ready to graduate. That moment made it tangible that what we do matters, a lot, to a lot of people, even if you don't constantly hear from them. I do miss the intimacy of the PyTorch community, with a 300 person conference that felt like an extended family gathering, but I feel that’s a small price to pay considering the scale of impact PyTorch is truly having today – yes the Conference is now 3,000 people where market-moving deals get brokered, but it’s helping orders of magnitude more people to do their best AI work. I miss the intimacy, but I'm proud of that growth.

To Mark Zuckerberg and Mike Schroepfer, who believed that open-sourcing is fundamentally important and is a sound business strategy. This is so hard to understand for most people within the course of business, but we’ve run lock-step on this strategy without ever having to discuss it. Without you two, neither FAIR nor PyTorch would’ve happened. And those mean so much to me.

To Yann LeCun and Rob Fergus, for building the magical early FAIR that I so revere.

To Aparna Ramani, a leader that I find so rare at Meta in her ability to hold a really high bar for the org, technically brilliant with the span to discuss deep infra systems and industry-strategy within the same conversation and for being an absolute execution-machine! I’ve learned so much from you.

To Santosh, Kaushik, Delia, Oldham and Ben for being so welcoming to Infra. For someone coming over from FAIR with a wildly different culture, you all made me feel at home and made me part of the family, and thank you for that.

To all my managers who've championed me through the PSC video game – Serkan, Howard, Jerome, Abhijit, Yoram, Joelle, Aparna and Damien – I owe you a lifetime of drinks.

Signing off for now.

—Soumith

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