As we step into a new year, it’s a great moment to reflect on the incredible community events that made 2024 a memorable year for the PyTorch Foundation. Global meetups, events, and conferences brought the community together to learn, connect, and grow. Here’s a quick recap of the year’s highlights and what to expect in 2025.
PyTorch Seattle Meetup (May 23)
We hosted a PyTorch Meetup in Seattle in May at the Meta Bellevue Office where Meta, Microsoft, and Google gave technical talks and about 60 attendees participated in discussion and networking.
PyTorch Docathon 2024 (June 4-20)
The PyTorch Docathon returned for its third edition, spanning over two weeks in June. This unique event focused on improving PyTorch’s documentation with contributions from community members worldwide. Documentation is the backbone of any successful open source project, and PyTorch’s Docathon fostered inclusivity and collaboration, making it easier for new users to adopt the framework and for experienced developers to maximize its potential. The 2024 Docathon resulted in more than 50 merged pull requests and was a testament to the collaborative spirit of the PyTorch community and its commitment to enhancing accessibility and usability. Watch the PyTorch Docathon Kickoff on YouTube.
PyTorch Shanghai Meetup (August 15)
In August, the PyTorch Shanghai Meetup brought together developers, researchers, and enthusiasts in Shanghai, China. This event served as a platform for knowledge sharing, with engaging talks and networking opportunities. Highlights from the agenda included insights into PyTorch’s latest developments, community-led presentations showcasing innovative use cases, and networking sessions fostering collaboration among attendees.
PyTorch Conference 2024 (September 18-19)
The PyTorch Conference in San Francisco was undoubtedly one of the year’s most significant events. This two-day gathering brought together top-tier researchers, developers, and academic communities, fostering collaboration and innovation in machine learning.
What Made It Special:
- Keynote speeches from industry leaders and PyTorch maintainers.
- In-depth sessions covering PyTorch’s end-to-end machine learning capabilities.
- Hands-on workshops and breakout sessions.
- A vibrant expo area showcasing cutting-edge tools and applications.
- Startup Showcase where early-stage founders pitched their AI startups to a panel of top venture capitalists.
- DL Compiler Mini-Summit that took a deep dive into the advances in deep learning (DL) compilers that are transforming AI workloads.
- Fine-Tuning Mini-Summit that covered everything from memory efficiency, parameter-efficient fine-tuning and quantization to performance at scale and reproducible evaluations.
- Poster Session showcasing innovations in PyTorch, including model optimization, hardware integration, generative AI, quantization, and tools for enhanced performance and usability, with contributions from industry leaders.
The conference’s focus on fostering collaboration underscored PyTorch’s role as a driving force in the open source ML community. Missed out? You can watch the PyTorch Conference 2024 Playlist to catch any sessions you might have missed.
GPU MODE IRL Hackathon (September 21)
PyTorch sponsored this meetup in person in San Francisco where attendees made friends, watched keynotes, hacked all day, took breaks with afternoon talks, and then hacked all night. We heard about torchao, our new quantization and sparsity library, vLLM which deploys PyTorch models in production, llm.c, and more. Key takeaways included: GPU Mode IRL Hackathon 1st place winner was inspired by PyTorch FlexAttention to improve CUTLASS, NCCL in Triton would help us do distributed programming with a minimal NCCL reimplementation in pure Python, No libtorch pytorch binaries dramatically reduces binary sizes for on device deployments.
Consumer AI Edge Hackathon (November 22-23)
The PyTorch team served as mentors and coaches in a Hackathon in Paris, co-sponsored by Hugging Face, Scaleway, and Entrepreneur First, challenging teams to create innovative consumer (B2C) applications leveraging Hugging Face, PyTorch and other open source on-device tools and models. 120+ people across 22 teams hacked for 2 days (and nights!) building the future of AI-powered on-device solutions based on open source models and tools. Participants created innovative applications, powered by PyTorch, ExecuTorch and Hugging Face resources, such as an on-device yoga coach, a magical storytelling companion and a Kinect-like experience to mobile phones. The PyTorch team is planning similar events in other geographies in 2025 around innovative on-device AI applications.
PyTorch Korea User Group Meetup (November 30)
The PyTorch Korea User Group, founded in 2018, is a community dedicated to introducing PyTorch to Korean-speaking users and growing together. The group began by translating PyTorch 0.3 tutorials into Korean and has since supported PyTorch’s growth in Korea. The group focuses on three primary activities:
- Sharing knowledge for PyTorch learning and application,
- Sharing insights and experiences in the field of artificial intelligence, and
- Fostering growth through online and offline networking.
The PyTorch Korea User Group reaches tens of thousands of Korean AI developers every month. If you’re interested in their activities, check out these links:
- PyTorch Korea User Group
- PyTorch Korean Tutorials
- PyTorch Korean Community
- GitHub Repository
- YouTube Channel
The PyTorch Korea User Group has planned three major activities for the year:
- PyTorch CoreSIG
Since December 2024, this weekly online event has been held every Wednesday afternoon. Led by Kim Hong-Seok, CSO of Rebellions (a PyTorch member company), it provides in-depth knowledge and experience regarding PyTorch internals. Approximately 150 Korean developers participate weekly, reflecting growing interest in PyTorch Core development in Korea. - Offline Meetup
These meetups provide opportunities to share insights and experiences in PyTorch and artificial intelligence, along with networking. Around 3–4 sessions are planned for this year, focusing on key topics in PyTorch and AI. - Online Community Engagement
This activity involves sharing and discussing various projects and papers in the AI field. For more information, visit: https://discuss.pytorch.kr.
Open Source AI Night at NeurIPS 2024 (December 10)
The PyTorch Foundation co-hosted a social event at NeurIPS along with The Fin AI and Open Finance Foundation that featured engaging discussions on open source AI and applications in finance.
PyTorch Webinars
Throughout 2024, PyTorch hosted the following virtual webinars:
Expert Exchanges:
- How does batching work on modern CPUs?
- DistServe: disaggregating prefill and decoding for goodput-optimized LLM inference
- Efficient Streaming Language Models with Attention Sinks
- Adapting open source models with Open-Instruct and Tulu
- Efficient Generative Models: From Sparse to Distributed Inference
Summer Series:
- Using PyTorch for Monocular Depth Estimation Webinar
- Accelerating LLM family of models on Arm Neoverse based Graviton AWS processors with KleidiAI
- torch.compile: The Missing Manual
Release Live Q&As:
Live Webinars:
- PyTorch Documentary Virtual Premiere
- Using PyTorch to Help Predict Wildfires
- Seismic Data to Subsurface Models with OpenFWI: Training an AI Model with PyTorch
- Dinosaur Bone Hunting with Intel AI
Each of these events underscored the importance of collaboration and community engagement in advancing AI research and applications. Thank you to everyone who participated, organized, and supported these events—your contributions make all the difference!
Looking Ahead
2024 was packed with opportunities to connect, learn, and contribute, and there will be even more ways to connect with the PyTorch community in 2025.
Mark your calendar! The PyTorch Conference is returning to San Francisco on October 22-23, 2025. Get ready for an exciting event filled with technical deep dives, exciting announcements, insightful sessions, and enhanced opportunities for community collaboration.
Stay tuned for more upcoming events and opportunities to get involved by subscribing to our newsletter.