India-born artificial intelligence pioneer Soumith Chintala has announced his departure from the Mark Zuckerberg-led tech giant Meta after being attached to the behemoth for over a decade. The currently New York-based techie shared the news via his social media platforms in addition to penning a lengthy post on his blog. Having spent “nearly all” his profession life as a Meta employee, the Chintala will be leaving the company and his long-running association with PyTorch on November 17.

Indian-origin Soumith Chintala quits Meta

Currently listed as an “AI Fixer” connected to the Meta brand on his LinkedIn profile, Chintala declared online, “I’m stepping down from PyTorch and leaving Meta on November 17th.” Baring his heart to his followers in the Thursday post (US time), he confessed that didn’t want to pursue the PyTorch line forever. And so, he found the “perfect time to transition” right after he resumed work following a “long leave.”

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“Eleven years at Meta. Nearly all my professional life. Making many friends for life. Almost eight years leading PyTorch, taking it from nothing to 90%+ adoption in AI,” he continued, calling the decision to depart “one of the hardest things” he’s ever done. Unlike other disgruntled employees, whose “layoff” confessions and other brokenhearted confessions have surged on social media, he admitted that he was “leaving with a full heart.”

Having co-founded PyTorch for Meta, he once branded it as a the “most impactful project” that he’s ever been involved in, as per his blog introduction. Reiterating the same sentiment in his new Meta exit update, he proudly boasted about his creation powering foundation models responsible for redefining intelligence. Noting how it was in production at “virtually every major AI company,” Soumith said that it was even being taught in classrooms across the globe–“from MIT to rural Indian.”

Thanking everyone who had worked alongside him during his Meta and PyTorch journey, Chintala disclosed that his next endeavour would be “something small” and “new,” basically something he doesn’t “fully understand yet, allowing him to test his own limits. The Indian-origin AI techie also owned up that he could have easily switched to something new within Meta itself.

“But I needed to know what’s out there. I needed to do something small again,” he went on. “I couldn’t live with the counterfactual regret of never trying something outside Meta.”

Chintala didn’t forget to own up to having “one of the AI industry’s most leveraged seats.” Noting how he was behind something that was fuelling the entire AI industry, he professed that he had “every major AI company and hardware vendor” on speed dial. And yet, he had planned to give up his privileged seat and the power that was already in his hands because curiosity got the upper hand.

Who is Soumith Chintala?

According to the Meta employee’s (at least for now) blog, he grew up in Hyderabad, India, and later went on to get his Master’s of Science in Computer Science at New York University. Soumith completed his Bachelor of Technology in Information Technology at VIT University, Vellore.

He started his Meta journey as an engineering manager / software engineer in August 2014. As per his LinkedIn bio updates, he eventually stepped up to taking on the principal engineer role, followed by the distinguished engineer / senior director post. In February 2023, he was linked to Meta in a “VP / Fellow” capacity, and finally ended up on the “AI Fixer” role in July 2024 (to present day).

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Chintala has also been attached to banners like K-Scale Labs, Aiwyn, Spara, Answer.AI, Together AI, Odyssey, ReachRx, Lepton AI, Draw Things, Runway, 1X and Osmo, among others, as an investor. Early on, he even served as a research scholar at Carnegie Mellon University and a research intern at Siemens.

About PyTorch

Meta describes the tool as: “PyTorch is an open source deep learning framework built to be flexible and modular for research, with the stability and support needed for production deployment.”

In 2019, the Business Insider quoted Chintala saying that he couldn’t turn his back on the cyclic nature of AI research trends surging every five-six years. Most importantly, he couldn’t ignore the fact that they progressively kicked it up a notch every other time and got “crazier” and “harder.”

He attributed the creation of something like PyTorch to Facebook’s belief that AI research’s ever-changing course needed to be tapped into. “There was a need for something like PyTorch right when it got released,” he said. “We built the right product at the right time. If we built the same product a couple of years early and a couple of years later, it would not have the same kind of success and growth.”

Soumith admitted to have relied on Facebook’s other open source AI project, Torch, during his initial days at the company. However, he ultimately recognised how limiting it was. “If you wanted to build AI ideas, do research, or try neural networks, it was a struggle not because you couldn’t express your idea but because there’s no tooling to express your ideas in a reasonable way,” he added.

And so, he jumped on the chance to work on the next big thing, PyTorch, aka a new version of Torch, which was based on the popular programming language Python.