AI may be the hottest thing since sliced bread. But that doesn’t mean it’s getting easier to develop and run. According to a recent Boston Consulting Group poll, 74% of organizations are struggling to derive value from their AI investments.
William Falcon, the creator of PyTorch Lightning, a popular open source AI framework, says that one of the biggest mistakes businesses make is underestimating the amount of legwork involved in AI orchestration. “Building your own AI platform today is like building your own Slack — it’s complex, costly, and not core to your business,” he told TechCrunch. “The value for enterprises lies in their data, domain knowledge, and unique models — not in maintaining AI infrastructure.”
Falcon, a former Navy Seal trainee and Facebook AI Research intern, started developing PyTorch Lightning while an undergraduate student at Columbia. The framework provides a high-level interface for the AI library PyTorch, abstracting away the code to set up and maintain AI systems.
After dropping out his NYU Ph.D. program, Falcon decided to team up with Luis Capelo, Forbes’ former data products lead, to commercialize PyTorch Lighting. Their venture, Lightning AI, takes the open source framework and layers enterprise-focused services and tools on top.
“We have thousands of developers single-handedly training and deploying models [with Lightning AI] at a scale that would have required teams of developers without Lightning,” said Falcon.
Lightning AI handles normally cumbersome tasks like distributing AI workloads across servers and provisioning the infrastructure needed to evaluate and train AI. The company’s flagship product, AI Studios, allows customers to fine-tune and run AI models in the cloud environments that they prefer.
Lightning AI’s development platform. Image Credits:Lightning AI
Companies can even use Lightning AI to host AI-powered apps that run on private cloud infrastructure or their on-premises data centers. Pricing is pay-as-you-go, with a free tier that includes 22 “GPU hours” per month.
Falcon says that t …