[cosmic_ape]

As other comments mention, if Tensorflow is seen for what it is - a framework for computation, rather than just "a deep learning thingy", it may be pretty useful.

It is probably quite far from a standard usage, but Tensorflow may be used to write some custom graphical models inference, for example. To be practical these algorithms can not be implemented in, say, pure python.

The point is Tensorflow gets you pretty close to assembly level computation. The alternative is to write in, say, cython - which is much more time consuming to write, and does not give you parallelization for free. Another alternative I guess would be torch, but that is the same as tensorflow the way I see it.