I always wondered how much the pytorch team could make if they quit and forked the project. I'm sure plenty of companies would be willing to sponsor them.

As I see it there’s a difference between sponsor and maintain. Sponsorships help but they don’t help in the same way someone with active knowledge of the domain does.

I see it as this, you can throw money at a project to build a new OS but you still need the right people to have an actually good OS.

I'm saying the team should quit and spin out an open source company to work on pytorch (same for react). They'd get much more buy in from the other big tech companies (like amazon) by being a neutral party and not part of Facebook.

There's a ton of companies that would be happy to pay them to keep working on it.

counter-example: CPython, NumPy, SciPy and many critical well-used open-source projects that have tiny volunteer teams and operational budgets that are minuscule compared to something like React / PyTorch

I don't think torch is maintained by Meta AI (which is LeCun's devision), but some other part of Meta.

That's a good question. But I would expect Torch's direction of development to be guided by Meta AI first and SOTA work by other companies second.