Comment by yipinwong

11 hours ago

Dumb question from non-AI engineer.

Is this somehow Google's answer to today's best DeepSeek open-sourcing inferencing engine?

I dont think big companies like Google react to news like that. Very likely this was meant to go out on Tuesday for weeks now. And it just happened to have coincided with another news.

Yeah they read the news this morning and whipped up a quick Torch->XLA translation layer and coordinated with four different inference engines (who also all wrote their own blog posts) and shoved this out the door quick to stay on top of the news cycle

We might never know, but they probably didn't read the news and started working to get this out, they were probably working on it for a while now.

Personally the question is if they are "saving" other projects or news so they can be released in case a competitor makes a move? Who knows if this was ready days or weeks ago and were waiting on someone to drop some news, so they can shadow those news.

They do different things and sit in different parts of the stack (training vs inference). TorchTPU seems more like a play to get more people familiar with Googles TPU chips as they want to sell them to people outside of google.