[golly_ned]

There was Chainer, which originated the define-by-run model that characterized PyTorch’s effectiveness. It was developed by a much smaller, much less influential company in Japan. Early PyTorch is transparent about the debt owed to Chainer.

[cs702]

Thanks. Yes, I remember Chainer, but only vaguely. I kinda remember looking at it, but not actually using it.

My recollection is that when I looked at Chainer back then, it didn't offer a comprehensive library of preexisting components for deep learning. When I tried PyTorch, on the other hand, I vividly remember it as already having lots of prebuilt components (common layers, activation functions, etc.) in `torch.nn`, so it was easier and faster to get going.

These memories are vague, so I could be wrong.

[maxc01]

Yes, exactly—not many people know about Chainer nowadays. Back in 2016, PyTorch's interface was actually inferior to Chainer's, and I think Chainer's design was really ahead of its time.

[NalNezumi]

The company is called preferred networks, and they're still around, and have some branched off subsidiaries too.