Facebook Inc. intends to partner with Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.'s cloud unit, Alibaba Cloud Computing Co., to develop its open-source machine learning platform PyTorch.
Speaking at the Alibaba Apsara Conference 2019 on Sept. 26 in China, Facebook's vice president of infrastructure Bill Jia said it wants to launch PyTorch on Alibaba Cloud, allowing greater access for developers.
"We hope that Alibaba professionals can cooperate with Facebook on PyTorch to develop software. Facebook and Alibaba can [benefit from] in-depth cooperation from using PyTorch, such as helping with language translations from English to Chinese," Jia said on the second day of the AI and cloud computing conference.
Facebook handles around 6 billion text translations daily using artificial intelligence and automated translation tools, Jia said. The company trained many of its neural machine translation models — which use AI to predict word sequences for faster translation — using the open-source PyTorch Translate framework.
In May, the social media giant announced the launch of PyTorch version 1.1, which enables graph-based machine learning, and stressed the importance of developing the PyTorch community of developers.
On day one of the conference, Alibaba introduced its first artificial intelligence chip, Hanguang 800, which it said will speed up machine learning tasks. The Chinese e-commerce company said the new chip will help boost Alibaba's cloud computing capabilities.
