I was pretty involved in the PyTorch ecosystem in the early days around 2016 and Adam was nothing short of a genius and prolific developer whose contributions to the codebase and community were immense. I think he was like an undergrad in Poland at the time. My understanding is that his contributions came before the internship, but I don’t know.

My memory is that Souminth was really open to other people’s contributions and questions, no matter their credentials. He was a great leader who felt approachable to the open-source community.

I didn't know that. Soumith Chintala certainly paid it forward. He was very helpful and supportive of random strangers (like me!) in the early pytorch days. I count him with Andrej Karpathy and Chris Olah as one of the people who really made machine learning accessible to regular software engineers.

Chris Olah is the goat.

I reached out to him myself years ago and was surprised at getting a response.

And the response was incredibly generous. I probably wouldn't have had the confidence to do my switch if it wasn't for Olah.

And as I got further into this path, I learned that Olah had done the same for some of my mentors and colleagues.

Every time Olah speaks, I listen.

You can't do anything if you never try.