GenAI Won’t Replace Open Source, Says AWS Exec
SAN FRANCISCO — One of the biggest questions people have about generative AI (GenAI) is what it means for humans. For example, will it improve our personal connections, our productivity, and our role in the workforce? Or will it take our jobs and turn us into aimless consumers?
Narrowing the question, what will GenAI mean for open source communities — will deep learning models take over for the creativity, innovation and collaboration that people bring to open source projects? According to Adam Seligman, vice president of developer experience at AWS, we needn’t worry.
At the annual PyTorch Conference sponsored by the PyTorch Foundation in September, Alex Williams, founder of The New Stack, spoke with Seligman about AWS’s commitment to open source projects and communities, including PyTorch. You can watch their full conversation below.
What Is PyTorch?
PyTorch is an open source deep learning framework originally developed by Facebook AI Research (now Meta) starting in 2016, and donated to the PyTorch Foundation in 2022. AWS serves on the PyTorch governing board, along with AMD, Arm, Google, Huawei, Hugging Face, Intel, IBM, Lightning AI, Meta, Microsoft Azure and Nvidia. Currently, AWS has about 20 engineers contributing code to PyTorch, said Seligman. For example, Sunita Nadampalli, a principal engineer at Amazon, presented one of these projects, optimizing PyTorch Inference on aarch64 Linux CPUs, at PyTorch 2024.
Because it’s based on Python, which is already deeply integrated with machine learning, PyTorch is a natural fit for data scientists using deep learning models. It was adapted from the Torch library, an open source scientific computing project well regarded for its ease of use, neural network libraries and community-contributed libraries for machine learning, computer vision and more.
Open Source, GenAI and AWS
Open source has been foundational to AWS’s growth and innovation, Seligman told Williams. AWS has used open source since the early days, contributed to open source, and is involved in really big projects like OpenSearch, Valkey and PyTorch as a contributor. [Open source] lets creative, technical people bring their best ideas to life. And it’s done in a really delightful way where there’s both technical innovation and a lot of human knowledge sharing and best practices. These communities are bigger than the code itself.”
When it comes to generative AI, AWS wants technologists to have flexibility and choice, Seligman said. “AWS wants developers to pick and choose the frameworks and libraries and tooling they want to build really awesome and innovative things. But at the same time also deliver the things that their company is going to want and their customers want.”
And one of those “things” is keeping data safe, which is where security and governance come into play. Seligman said, “I don’t think there’s any conflict with using open source innovation to build really neat new generative AI applications, but then also keep them locked down and secure so that your end users can really trust them and your data is safe and the output is responsible.”
Watch the Full Video
To hear more of the insightful conversation between Seligman and Williams, including their thoughts about API security, how new tools are changing the developer role and how AWS saved $240 million a year by upgrading Java, watch the complete interview in the video below. Also, make sure to catch up on key learnings from PyTorch Conference 2024 on the PyTorch YouTube channel.
