Keynote: PyTorch CTO - Matt White, Global CTO of AI, Linux Foundation

This talk provides an overview of the current state and growth of the PyTorch Foundation and its ecosystem at the PyTorch Conference Europe 2026. The speaker highlights how PyTorch has established itself as a central hub for various open-source technologies, which have recently expanded to include nine new projects in just three months. The session emphasizes the importance of community governance, collaboration, and the need for a structured ecosystem that supports innovation without fragmentation. The speaker also announces the upcoming PyTorch training and certification program aimed at providing a pathway for users to demonstrate their capabilities with the framework. Additionally, the session introduces significant projects like SafeTensors and OpenMVG, which enhance safety and governance in the machine learning space. The speaker encourages community involvement and collaboration to help strengthen the PyTorch ecosystem.

Good morning everyone. Um, it's a pleasure to join you on day two here of PyTorch Conference Europe 2026. Um, so before we get started, although we're still filling in, I I'd love to see a show of hands. Who Who was actually here last year for PyTorch Day? All right, less than I would have expected, but uh certainly um it's really hard to believe that we were just

here a year ago and we we were up in a room up upstairs here. We had, you know, less than 100 people and and now we're actually uh six times that amount here at PyTorch Conference EU, our very first, which is absolutely incredible. Uh, so what I want to do in the next few minutes is give you a concise view of the where we are at the

PyTorch Foundation today, what's growing in the ecosystem, and where we are building more structure for the community to contribute, govern, and scale with confidence. So PyTorch has become the gravitational center for a wide range of important open-source technologies from model tooling, optimization, interoperability, distributed systems, performance-oriented developer tools as well. And you can see some familiar names here from across, you know, training, inference, export, and so forth.

Uh, but in the last three months alone, we have added nine new projects to the the PyTorch ecosystem. And this really matters. This matters because, you know, the future of AI infrastructure will not be made up of a number of siloed projects, but built by interoperable communities that solve critical components of the PyTorch um And so, what we're seeing now is what we would call like ecosystem

pull. Uh, a lot of projects want to align with PyTorch because it's the community is very large. Uh, we're technically credible. Uh, we're increasingly well organized, and not to mention, we're pretty good-looking. So. Um, and the landscape continues to see healthy growth. Uh, we have a total of 73 projects as of yesterday. Uh, there's five currently in the foundation and a broader ecosystem of 68 ecosystem projects

and the family continues to grow here. The the repository and contributor accounts show that this is not really a small club anymore. you know, the the chart on the right here starts to show that yes, we're, you know, increasing gradually, but we're we really started to kick off in this last year our our growth on ecosystem projects. Um, and for me a key point in around this

is really that healthy ecosystems do not grow only in usage, they grow in contributor depth and project diversity and the ability to absorb new new ideas without fragmenting the community. And this is exactly what we're building towards. So to scale an ecosystem ecosystem well, you need more than code, right? Uh, you need an operating structure. Our working groups are where a lot of that structure takes shape

today and we have active efforts around ecosystem development, accelerators, security, multi-cloud working group, um, and CI infrastructure. And importantly, we're adding new focus areas with the OSPO and academic outreach. And so this addition is pretty significant. Uh, OSPO engagement helps academy academia participate more effectively in open source. Uh, academic outreach helps strengthen the bridge from research into durable open source projects and really helps strengthen the communities

that rely on understanding of open source projects and tooling and helps bring uh, early candidate projects into the foundation and helps us shepherd those uh, project growth. Um, the working groups are really how we are going to foster this collaboration and, you know, engage with meaningful stakeholders. And so we'd love to see more community involvement in these working groups. Uh, one of the clearest signals of maturity

in an ecosystem is when people ask not only, can I use this, but how can I prove that I can use this well? And this is why we're excited to launch the PyTorch training and certification. So we've got PyTorch certified associate certification which is which is scheduled for Q2 2026, so coming up soon. And this is a training course that will be self-guided as well as a

certification exam. And uh you cannot send your open claw to take this exam. Um this is important for individuals because it creates a credible learning pathway, right? It is very important for employees because they understand what practical PyTorch capabilities mean in the industry. And it's important for the ecosystem because it creates a shared baseline of understanding around tools, concepts, and best practices. So we're fundamentally making PyTorch,

you know, not only easier to adopt, but also easier to master. And the PyTorch family is expanding with complementary projects that reflect where the market and the developer communities are going. So we've got large-scale model serving, distributed execution, training optimization, and new infrastructure layers. But the objective here is to make collaboration easier across projects that are naturally aligned. And a strong foundation should not be a should

be able to welcome diverse technical communities while preserving clarity of purpose. And so this is this model that we're working to build of shared governance, neutral stewardship, and room for innovation. So building on the back of yesterday's announcement of Helion joining the PyTorch Foundation as a hosted project, can I should should I just stay on this slide for a couple of hours? Um What's in the box?

I'm excited to share that Hugging Face SafeTensors has also joined the PyTorch Foundation. So SafeTensors is a great example of the kind of project that matters in at ecosystem scale, right? It solves a real problem. It improves safety and trust in ML workflows. And it has already seen broad adoption across the community. Um and these are exactly the kinds of projects and contributions that help strengthen the

PyTorch ecosystem. So, I'm pleased to welcome Lysandre Debou to from Hugging Face to the stage to talk about safe safe tensors and the contributions to the PyTorch Foundation. Uh Lysandre, thanks for your contribution. Thanks, Matt. I couldn't be more excited to be here having the very first PyTorch conference hosted PyTorch conference EU hosted in Paris. Makes me really really happy and to really kick kick things off

on the right way, I think there's no better way than to have a big announcement like the one above. Safe tensors is um a serialization library that saves and loads your machine learning models safely, reliably, but also in a perfor- in a performance manner. And so, it has always been open source since its very first release 2 or 3 years ago. It has It has always been

But with the move to the PyTorch Foundation, um it still it still changes thing It changes things significantly. One of the main things it changes it's the open governance model in which um instead of just contributing to the technical specificities of the project, you can now contribute to the direction, to the strategy of the project. Um Machine learning is big. Uh making machine learning safe is also

a big project. It cannot be made in isolation, so we really need your help if we want to make it safer. Um please contribute to safe tensors not only in its techni- technical contribution, but also with the strategy, direction, and so on. We now have a clear path towards integration within PyTorch core with safe tensors as a clear way of serialization uh and yeah, saving and loading

models across the stack. So, I'm looking forward to having you model itself, to the uh safe tensors project itself, yes, but also the direction, the strategy, and so on. I'm looking forward to seeing you on the safe tensors GitHub, but also uploading some safe tensors on the Hugging Face Hub. Thank you very much. All right. So, one of the barriers to open source growth is that governance

often feels heavier than it needs to be. And that's why I'm excited about OpenMVG. So, MVG standing for minimum viable governance. The idea is straightforward. Uh make it much easier for projects to adopt vendor-neutral Linux Foundation-aligned governance in a way that is practical, extensible, and compatible with how modern developers actually work. Uh the governance package can be installed with your favorite agent, or you can be really

uncool and use the Python installer. Uh it has support for local repos as well as GitHub and GitLab. And good governance should not be a tax on innovation. It should be an accelerator. And, you know, what we do here at in the PyTorch Foundation is create that vendor-neutral governance. And so, this is a tool to help you get started um with with this framework. And I'd also

like to invite you to join us for the 2026 PyTorch Docathon. Uh that will take place May 5th to 19th. Uh this is a virtual event. It's aimed at enhancing PyTorch documentation. And and as, you know, documentation is is obviously something we need to work towards to help enable new users and the community to to work with PyTorch. So, I would encourage you to join, and there's

some cool prizes. Uh so, if there's one action call to action I want to leave you with today, it's participate. Uh contribute to a foundation project, propose your project to the ecosystem, bring your company into the foundation, join the TAC, join a working group, become an ambassador, or host a meet-up. The PyTorch Foundation is not something that's happening somewhere else. It is a community structure for us

all to build together. And the ecosystem will only be a strong, inclusive, and durable as the people that choose to shape it. Uh and with that, I would leave you with a challenge. When you go up to get your caffeine fix, uh don't gravitate towards the faces that you recognize, but introduce yourself to somebody you do not know. Uh hear about what they're working on, tell them

about what you're working on, and this is the way that you're going to grow your network. It's also the way that we're going to grow a more durable and well-connected So, with that, thank you for being a part of this community, uh the work you're doing, and for helping make the PyTorch framework not uh powerful framework, but also creating a stronger ecosystem. And thanks again, enjoy the

rest of the conference. Thank you.