Salman Chishti

What did Microsoft Employees study at university?

Thank you @ARealityEvent for recognizing #XRBlocks for the #Auggie Award -- it really means a lot to me & the small XR Blocks team!! Kudos to David Li, @NelsNuman, @xun_qian_, @Zhongyi_Zhou_, David Kim, Ben Hersh, & 20%ers: let's keep accelerating the AI + XR innovation! 🙏🙏🙏

fun to work on this!

We have a draft of new report from GitHub Next! 🚀 github.com/githubnext/rep… The Impact of Automated Repository Maintenance Assistance - We analyze the impact of 🌈 Repo Assist, a proactive AI repository agent implemented as a GitHub Agentic Workflow, across 13 open source repositories in early 2026. - The agent reduced open issue counts in every repository - 578 issues total. - The repositories, which were largely dormant, achieved median velocity increases of 8× for issue closure and 10× for PR merges, transforming largely dormant projects into actively maintained ones. - We model repositories as human-agent software factories - the factory’s throughput is gated by human decision-making. Read the draft in our repository github.com/githubnext/rep…

Agentic repository automation changes almost everything about how we engineer software. We've discovered this at GitHub Next over the last 6 months, and the rest of the world will (re)discover it too, over the coming years. To help you take the journey faster, and be ahead of the wave, we've prepared a blog series for you called Peli's Agent Factory, where @pelikhan takes you on a journey through repository automation and its uses github.github.com/gh-aw/blog/202…

@_ryanlin10 nice one!

A researcher’s best thinking is lost. Scattered across scraps of paper, blackboards, and scribbled notebooks. We built an AI notebook that lets messy human chains of thought compound into a living knowledge base.

Direct from Apple, didn't expect that much dirt 😕

GitHub Actions now supports timezone settings for scheduled workflows plus using environments without triggering automatic deployments. github.blog/changelog/2026…

We now support environments without auto-deployments @github Read more here: #using-environments-without-deployments" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">docs.github.com/en/actions/how…

@khushbooverma @MistralAI @wandb @jumptrading @awscloud Amazing to see you! What an amazing project you made!

Spending the weekend hacking at @MistralAI Global Hackathon. 👩🏻‍💻

@khushbooverma Congrats!

Excited to share that I’ve joined Cloudflare as a Distributed Systems Engineer in London 🧡 Looking forward to learning about systems at scale and their nuances.

@khushbooverma Welcome to London!

Day 1 of moving to London and starting a new life! ❤️❄️

We know we have work to do in maintaining our own open source surfaces for GitHub Actions (actions, runner-images, starter workflows, toolkits, etc.). That being said, I wanted to address what was discussed and also share what’s next for GitHub Actions: With respect to `safe_sleep` in self-hosted runners (note: this never impacted GitHub-hosted runners)... • We fixed the implementation causing an infinite loop on August 14th and cut a new runner release in October. So this bug has been fixed[^1] and released for a month or so. We missed closing the related issue[^2] as part of that release and then closed it on December 1st. • As for burning CPU while sleeping, this is obviously not great from just a quality of engineering perspective, but this was an intentional change away from relying on the OS sleep to address a customer case where it didn't work when sleep was not available. We are fixing this now to use sleep if it's present and fall back to this implementation only if it's not available. This script is only used in 2 scenarios: updating the self-hosted runner when a new version is available and recovering from an unhealthy termination. With the infinite loop issue fixed, the CPU inefficiency, while still not great, should have very little real impact to self-hosted runners CPU utilization and zero GitHub Actions billing impact to customers. The biggest impact is customer configs using multiple self-hosted runners on the same machine. In that case, during the seconds that this sleep is running during an infrequent update or after an unhealthy runner termination, the other runners would suffer from CPU consumption. • All of this is completely unrelated to any sleeps within workflows and jobs themselves. As for file hash issue[^3], a hosted runner image update that started rolling out on November 22 caused failures related to an unintended breaking change in the runner agent cached in the image. This was rolled back on November 23, which mitigated all customer impact. Hosted runner agent updates have been paused until improvements identified from this are completed, but image updates were unblocked on the 25th to ensure we continue to provide security updates for our hosted runners. GitHub Actions is a core primitive of GitHub and important to its future. Last year, GitHub gave away 11.5 billion build minutes for free to open source projects[^4] (which I think is about ~$184 million dollars). The Actions team’s priority for the last 18 months has been on scaling and reliability. In the last few months, the team has also focused on community asks and shipped support private/internal .github repos[^5], increased the actions cache size >10GB[^6], shipped Action workflow YAML anchors[^7], increased workflow dispatch limits[^8], and increased reusable workflow limits[^9]. As for what’s next, the Actions team is now going to be focused on: • Support for timezones[^10] in scheduled jobs and updates to schedule reliability • Return the run ID from workflow dispatch[^11] • Adding a switch function for expressions so they have a conditional operator or function[^12] • UX improvements, including faster page load times, better rendering for workflows with over 300 jobs, and a filter for the jobs list. • Parallel steps[^13] (one of the most requested features from GitHub Actions community I think this covers most of it, but we’ll follow up soon with more details in a proper blog post [1] github.com/actions/runner… [2] github.com/actions/runner… [3] github.com/actions/runner… [4]github.blog/news-insights/… [5] #use-workflow-templates-from-non-public-github-repositories" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">github.blog/changelog/2025… [6]github.blog/changelog/2025… [7] github.blog/changelog/2025… [8] github.blog/changelog/2025… [9] #increased-limits-for-reusable-workflows" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">github.blog/changelog/2025… [10] github.com/orgs/community… [11] github.com/orgs/community… [12] github.com/orgs/community… [13] github.com/orgs/community…

@soumithchintala Excited to hear what's next for you!

Leaving Meta and PyTorch I'm stepping down from PyTorch and leaving Meta on November 17th. tl;dr: Didn't want to be doing PyTorch forever, seemed like the perfect time to transition right after I got back from a long leave and the project built itself around me. Eleven years at Meta. Nearly all my professional life. Making many friends for life. Almost eight years leading PyTorch, taking it from nothing to 90%+ adoption in AI. Walking away from this was one of the hardest things I've ever done. But I'm leaving with a full heart. PyTorch handles exascale training now. It powers foundation models that are redefining intelligence. It's in production at virtually every major AI company. It's taught in classrooms from MIT to rural India. The tools I dreamed about making accessible? They are. The barrier to entry I wanted to lower? It's almost gone. To be clear, there’s so much more to do. As long as AI evolves at a breakneck pace, PyTorch will continue to play catch up. Obsessing over the yet-to-come sometimes makes us forget how much we’ve already done. To everyone who built this with me—who believed research should be joyful, that tools should be elegant, that open source changes everything—thank you. This wasn't my journey. It was ours. What's next for me? Something small. Something new. Something I don't fully understand yet. Something uncomfortable. I could have moved to something else inside Meta. But I needed to know what's out there. I needed to do something small again. I couldn't live with the counterfactual regret of never trying something outside Meta. It's very hard to leave. I probably have one of the AI industry’s most leveraged seats, I lead the software layer that powers the entire AI industry. Every major AI company and hardware vendor are on a speed dial. This kind of power is really hard to give up. But curiosity ultimately won out in my head. Keep making AI delicious and accessible. I'll be watching. Probably filing issues. Definitely staying involved. Is PyTorch going to be okay? I don't want to be doing PyTorch forever. I don't want to be like Guido or Linus— bound to a single thing for decades. Last November, coinciding with the birth of my daughter, I started planning my exit with Aparna. My goal was to leave PyTorch in a good and stable place. By this August, during the second half of my parental leave, I knew: Edward, Suo, Alban, Greg, John, Joe and Jana were ready. The team faced hard people, product, technical and organizational problems and didn’t feel the need to lean back on me to solve these for them (unlike in the past). The product story they crafted for the PyTorch Conference was coherent—really coherent. The things I'd flagged red were turning healthy. The project didn't need me anymore. Unlike 2020-2022 (when I stepped down to go do robotics and came back when Lin, Dima and Dwarak left), I have strong confidence that this time PyTorch is truly resilient. The most aligned culture carriers of PyTorch – Greg, Alban, Ed, Jason and Joe are at the decision table now, and people with strong value alignment – Suo, John and Jana have joined them at the table. And there’s a long list of equally value-aligned people willing to sit at the table should any of these people leave. There are many little things that make up my confidence on the people – John worked on Julia and open-source for a very long time (in fact we hacked a Torch.jl in 2015), Suo has been the strongest systems builder and strategic partner I’ve had for the past two years, and Jana worked on resilient core systems for a very long time, I’ve had long technical and organizational discussions with her over the past few months that give me confidence. And the product lineup and execution in 2025 should be sufficient evidence for any remaining doubt. I’m confident that this band of PyTorchers are going to do exceptionally well. PyTorch might change in flavor because I no longer impose my own taste from the top, but I’m confident that the values are going to stay intact and the product is going to be awesome. My time at Meta The early years of FAIR were absolutely magical. I was part of a small family of absolutely brilliant people building state-of-the-art AI out in the open. From working on GANs with Emily Denton, Rob Fergus, Leon Bottou, Martin Arjovsky and the (now legendary) Alec Radford to building Starcraft bots with Gabriel Synnaeve, to building the first FAIR Cluster with Howard Mansell, to working on object detection with Adam Lerer and Piotr Dollar, to building PyTorch. It was more fun than I can describe in words. 2015 and 2016 were probably the most productive and professionally enjoyable years of my life. I’ll probably romanticize this period of my life forever. When I joined FAIR, I had massive impostor syndrome, and the first 3 months were very very difficult. I can’t credit Andrew Tulloch enough for being the most thoughtful, kind and welcoming mentor, without whom I wouldn’t have made it. I’m so damn bullish for Meta just from the fact that he’s back. --- My time on PyTorch was special. I loved every part of building it—designing it, managing it, being the PM, TL, comms lead, doc engineer, release engineer, squashing bugs, growth hacking, turning it into a coherent product with hundreds of people, transitioning it to industry stakeholdership – the whole nine yards. To the core PyTorch team at Meta: the engineers, researchers, open-source maintainers, docs writers, CI infrastructure folks, hardware partners, the community builders. To the hundreds more inside and outside Meta—thank you. You turned a library into a movement. There are too many people to credit and thank, but I can't not mention Adam Paszke, Sam Gross, Greg Chanan, Joe Spisak, Alban Desmaison, Edward Yang, Richard Zou, Tongzhou Wang, Francisco Massa, Luca Antiga, Andreas Köpf, Zach DeVito, Zeming Lin, Adam Lerer, Howard Mansell and Natalia Gimelshein. And Schrep. They made the launch happen. And so many more people became centrally important later: Lu Fang, Xiaodong Wang, Junjie Bai, Nikita Shulga, Horace He, Mark Saroufim, Jason Ansel, Dmytro Dzhulgakov, Yangqing Jia, Geeta Chauhan, Will Constable, Briah Hirsh, Jane Xu, Mario Lezcano, Piotr Balecki, Yinghai Lu, Less Wright, Andrew Tulloch, Bruce Lin, Woo Kim, Helen Suk, Chris Gottbrath, Peng Wu, Joe Isaacson, Eli Uriegas, Tristan Rice, Yanan Cao, Elias Ellison, Animesh Jain, Peter Noordhuis, Tianyu Liu, Yifu Wang, Lin Qiao and hundreds more. It’s criminal of me to not take the space to list out everyone else I should be mentioning here. PyTorch is nothing without its people ❤️. The most joyful moments of building PyTorch was meeting users eager to share their happiness, love and feedback. I remember a grad student coming to me at Neurips 2017, in a slurring emotional voice he said he’d been trying to make progress on his research for 3 years but within 3 months of using PyTorch he made so much progress that he was ready to graduate. That moment made it tangible that what we do matters, a lot, to a lot of people, even if you don't constantly hear from them. I do miss the intimacy of the PyTorch community, with a 300 person conference that felt like an extended family gathering, but I feel that’s a small price to pay considering the scale of impact PyTorch is truly having today – yes the Conference is now 3,000 people where market-moving deals get brokered, but it’s helping orders of magnitude more people to do their best AI work. I miss the intimacy, but I'm proud of that growth. --- To Mark Zuckerberg and Mike Schroepfer, who believed that open-sourcing is fundamentally important and is a sound business strategy. This is so hard to understand for most people within the course of business, but we’ve run lock-step on this strategy without ever having to discuss it. Without you two, neither FAIR nor PyTorch would’ve happened. And those mean so much to me. To Yann LeCun and Rob Fergus, for building the magical early FAIR that I so revere. To Aparna Ramani, a leader that I find so rare at Meta in her ability to hold a really high bar for the org, technically brilliant with the span to discuss deep infra systems and industry-strategy within the same conversation and for being an absolute execution-machine! I’ve learned so much from you. To Santosh, Kaushik, Delia, Oldham and Ben for being so welcoming to Infra. For someone coming over from FAIR with a wildly different culture, you all made me feel at home and made me part of the family, and thank you for that. To all my managers who've championed me through the PSC video game – Serkan, Howard, Jerome, Abhijit, Yoram, Joelle, Aparna and Damien – I owe you a lifetime of drinks. --- Signing off for now. —Soumith

@_sofiacamara_ you should collab with @ILLENIUM!

@ZeglerSource soo sad cause she walked just a few steps away and started going the other direction to sign! D: was about 45 minutes outside waiting

Rachel at the ‘Evita’ stage door tonight via salmanmkc:

@ZeglerSource wow thanks for sharing haha

Rachel at the ‘Evita’ curtain call tonight via salmanmkc:

Set up your new GitHub Copilot agent for success! 🚀 This video will show you how to: ✅ Define clear, well-scoped issues. ⚙️ Utilize Copilot custom instructions effectively. 💻 Ensure a proper development environment setup. 🔗 Grant tool access via the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Watch and then head over to Docs for more tips! 👇 docs.github.com/en/copilot/usi…

Starting off the new year with a big ship. Copilot Workspace, our agentic editor, is now available to all paid Copilot users. It’s as easy as Spec. Plan. Brainstorm. Implement. Build/Repair. githubnext.com/projects/copil…

It all started with GitHub Actions. SWE you soon. 😉

SWE u very soon, actually 😉