As part of the ongoing process for growing the Apache TVM according to the Apache Maturity Model, here is a strawman proposal of a shared vision statement that helps to guide the long term goals of the project. It’s meant to capture our shared values and aspirations, introducing new community members to the high-level goals of the project while also guiding future work for seasoned contributors. Here’s a starting point for discussion, based on many of the papers and documentation associated with the project:
"The vision of the Apache TVM Project is to host a diverse community of experts and practitioners in machine learning, compilers, and systems architecture to build an accessible, extensible, and automated open-source framework that optimizes current and emerging machine learning models for any hardware platform."
I had several things I wanted to capture with this statement:
- This is an open community that welcomes diversity in all of its forms. Diversity is deliberately chosen to mean we respectfully welcome a wide spectrum of ideas and people, and that the community is stronger for that.
- The community has deep roots in academic machine learning, compiling, and systems, and will continue to grow that knowledge and expertise as new models, hardware, and software emerge in the machine learning landscape. This is balanced by the usability considerations required by practitioners to be able to easily and reliably compile models into production.
- There’s a balance between being concise enough to state the vision in one sentence, while being expansive enough to capture the ambitions of the project.
- Although we’re building software, the statement starts with community and the people who are participating in it.
With this as a starting point, is there anything that was missed or that could be stated more clearly?