[zo7]

I think the author raises a good point about Google envy. TensorFlow is not the most intuitive or flexible library out there, and it is very over-engineered if you're not doing large-scale distributed training. The main reason why everyone talks it up so much is because Google heavily marketed it from the outset, and everyone automatically assumes Google == Virtuoso Software Design because they couldn't make it through the interview. Really it's just modern enterprise software which has five different ways to implement batch norm that they push on the community so they don't have to train new hires on how to use it.

[dsl]

Or maybe it is built by a company that is doing large-scale distributed training, and they open sourced it not to cater to every need, but to help others trying to do the same thing they are. Companies are under no obligation to make sure their open source is well suited for others use cases.

[zo7]

That was kinda my point, it's not the be-all deep learning library because they made it for their own use case, but its towering popularity (as in 10x the number of stars of other popular libraries) is not genuine.

Also I highly doubt that the main reason Google open sourced it was to be charitable.