If you feel like giving up, you must read this never-before-shared story of the creator of PyTorch and ex-VP...

If you feel like giving up, you must read this never-before-shared story of the creator of PyTorch and ex-VP at Meta, Soumith Chintala.

> from hyderabad public school, but bad at math
> goes to a "tier 2" college in India, VIT in Vellore
> rejected from all 12 universities for US masters despite 1420 on the GRE
> fuckit.jpg
> goes to the US anyway on a J-1 visa to CMU with no plan
> applies for masters (again) to 15 universities
> rejected from all except USC and with late admissions, NYU in 2010
> finds this guy called Yann LeCun (before he was famous)
> starts getting into open source
> rejected from all jobs including DeepMind
> only job is Amazon as test engineer
> his PhD mentor helps him get a job at a small startup (MuseAmi)
> rejected from DeepMind
> couldn't get H-1B because of J-1 home return issue; gets waiver through months of approval with USCIS and US State Dept
> very low on confidence
> In 2011/12 builds one of the fastest AI inference engines on phones
> rejected from DeepMind
> emailed Yann again and joins FAIR because of Torch7 open-source work
> scrapes through bootcamp at Facebook, struggling on an HBase task
> L8/L9 engineers at Facebook struggle to get ImageNet working
> figures out numerics / hyperparam issue as an L4
> first big win!
> FAIR goes well, runs 3 person torch7 team and co-creates PyTorch
> because of politics, management wants to shut down PyTorch
> cries-at-bar.jpg, literally
> eventually some people save PyTorch and it launches in 2017
> gets a EB-1 green card!
> the rest is history...

Think about that. He went to a tier 2 college. Was rejected from all Masters programs 2x. Rejected from every single job except Amazon test engineering. Rejected from DeepMind 3x. Nearly had his baby project shut down. Struggled with visa issues. After 12 years of failures (2005-17), he eventually rose to became a VP at Meta one of the most influential people in AI!

Soumith's story is one of resilience and he's living proof that no matter how down in the dumps you are, there's always hope.

Some lore. Here's this awesome presentation Soumith wrote about his work at MuseAmi in 2014 about getting convnets to run on phones: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/117oZ9Hu6IbFyRQUEsAAzsEpgzpb8TVI9yIeZAk1T1AE/edit?slide=id.p#slide=id.p

Thanks @soumithchintala for sharing your story and being an inspiration to so many!

@soumithchintala I put “tier 2” in quotes so people don’t come after me for that subjective opinion. If you think it’s tier 1, it’s tier 1!