There’s no need to bury the lead here. Soumith Chintala is the central figure in a major transition in the world of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. He works at Meta where he’s the manager of PyTorch, an open source machine learning framework that was recently transferred to the Linux Foundation. PyTorch enables ML engineers to deploy new AI models in minutes rather than weeks.

Soumith has been a community leader for the past decade, but he was a self-described introvert when he was growing up in Hyderabad. He is a researcher with over 52,000 citations and an h-index of 29 in Machine Learning, computer vision, and robotics, while focusing on high-risk research. From Marvel movies to memes, people such as Soumith are admired in modern culture. But this wasn’t the case in the 1990s when being a geek was still outside the norm.

It’s a consistent pattern at most companies: High-value data and corporate memory are stored in isolated channels on disparate systems. Old processes are protected by those who have been there the longest. The problem is, the DNA of the company becomes lost as long-time employees depart, making it difficult for new hires to find what is available, why decisions were made, and who they can look to for answers. 

Michael Lewis talks about this in his podcast, “Against the Rules” in the series “Six Levels Down”. When he was looking for someone who actually understood how the insurance industry processes claims and what all the obfuscated code numbers meant, and how doctors actually get claims paid, he had to go six levels deep, to an overworked expert, toiling away down in the hospital basement. She actually knew what all that gobble-di-goop meant. 

Ashley Wolf, Open Source Program Office Lead at GitHub, has confronted this dilemma throughout her career. Not only can there be missing documentation for existing processes, there is pushback when it came to phasing out outdated processes and tooling.

Mentioned in this Episode

• Against the Rules: Six Levels Down, with Michael Lewis
• Ashley Wolf, Open Source Program Office Lead, GitHub

With major software vulnerabilities popping up on what seems like a weekly basis and government regulation imminent when it comes to providing a software bill of materials for any application sold to the United States government, collaboration on open source security is no longer optional.

Large enterprises have come to realize that it's better to work together, to find common solutions rather than go it alone. Some financial service companies have been hesitant to embrace the inevitable move to open source. They perceive it to be more of a risk than a reward.

The promise of innovation through collaboration hasn't been enough to change that perception. Even proven ROI hasn't done the trick. So what's the answer how do we reach financial institutions that are holding out, how do we help them make the transition?