I understand that MILA has found that it doesn't need to continue supporting Theano. However, I believe that the statement "MILA will discontinue support of Theano" is not equivalent to "Theano is dead". I feel that pytorch and tensorflow, even though they're backed by large companies, they're still lagging behind Theano as general machine learning framewroks (i.e. not just deep learning). Personally, I've benefited from all the effort that people have put in theano, and will continue to use it as long as it is the best tool that suits my needs (bayesian methods for model based reinforcement learning). For this, I am very grateful towards the Theano development team.
THanks! On Thursday, September 28, 2017 at 12:23:05 PM UTC-4, Pascal Lamblin wrote: > > Dear users and developers, > > After almost ten years of development, we have the regret to announce > that we will put an end to our Theano development after the 1.0 release, > which is due in the next few weeks. We will continue minimal maintenance > to keep it working for one year, but we will stop actively implementing > new features. Theano will continue to be available afterwards, as per > our engagement towards open source software, but MILA does not commit to > spend time on maintenance or support after that time frame. > > The software ecosystem supporting deep learning research has been > evolving quickly, and has now reached a healthy state: open-source > software is the norm; a variety of frameworks are available, satisfying > needs spanning from exploring novel ideas to deploying them into > production; and strong industrial players are backing different software > stacks in a stimulating competition. > > We are proud that most of the innovations Theano introduced across the > years have now been adopted and perfected by other frameworks. Being > able to express models as mathematical expressions, rewriting > computation graphs for better performance and memory usage, transparent > execution on GPU, higher-order automatic differentiation, for instance, > have all become mainstream ideas. > > In that context, we came to the conclusion that supporting Theano is no > longer the best way we can enable the emergence and application of novel > research ideas. Even with the increasing support of external > contributions from industry and academia, maintaining an older code base > and keeping up with competitors has come in the way of innovation. > > MILA is still committed to supporting researchers and enabling the > implementation and exploration of innovative (and sometimes wild) > research ideas, and we will keep working towards this goal through other > means, and making significant open source contributions to other projects. > > Thanks to all of you who for helping develop Theano, and making it > better by contributing bug reports, profiles, use cases, documentation, > and support. > > -- Yoshua Bengio, > Head of MILA > -- --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "theano-users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to theano-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
