New Platinum members include Nebius, Nscale and Shopify, deepening the PyTorch Foundation’s role as the intelligence layer for open source AI development

SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 20, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — The PyTorch Foundation, a community-driven hub for open source AI under the Linux Foundation, today announced the addition of nine new members at PyTorch Conference North America 2026. Expansion of the PyTorch Foundation ecosystem signals increased advancements to come in open source AI, with the foundation serving as a compounding hub for innovation.

The Foundation welcomes the following new members:

Platinum: Nebius, Nscale, and Shopify Inc.Silver: LightSeek Foundation and Lablup Inc.Associate: SKOPOS INDIA FOUNDATION, Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan, Messiah University, and Valencia College

AI innovation now happens across all stack layers simultaneously, with research, models, infrastructure, hardware, and production continuously driving each other forward. The PyTorch Foundation serves as the central hub of this interconnected ecosystem, uniting researchers, developers, and companies building open AI. Membership growth advances PyTorch as the critical enabler of AI hardware, with the future of AI innovation built on projects like PyTorch, vLLM, DeepSpeed, Ray, Helion, and Safetensors.

“Open systems learn faster when more people, projects, and organizations are working together, creating compounding gains,” said Mark Collier, executive director of the PyTorch Foundation. “Open source ecosystems let breakthroughs travel between organizations instead of staying locked inside one company. We are thrilled that these new members will share their advancements with the foundation in the pursuit of accelerated, open intelligence.”

Ecosystem Growth: PyTorch Foundation Member News 

Recent milestones across the PyTorch ecosystem highlight how AI itself is joining the learning loop to improve code, kernels, and research workflows. Updates include:

Bringing ExecuTorch to Arm Cortex-M CPUs – ExecuTorch now provides a direct path from PyTorch training to on-device inference. The Cortex-M backend enables PyTorch models to run directly on Arm Cortex-M CPUs with Arm CMSIS-NN acceleration. It supports all capability tiers (Scalar, DSP, and MVE/Helium) from a single workflow.The announcement of TorchNeuron –TorchNeuron is an open source native PyTorch backend for AWS Trainium (and corresponding Amazon EC2 instances: Trn2 and Trn3), enabling AI researchers and practitioners to experiment and run PyTorch workloads with a single configuration change. With eager execution, torch.compile, and native support for PyTorch APIs (DTensor, torch.distributed) and libraries like TorchTitan, TorchNeuron enables workflows from research experimentation to production deployment.Native PyTorch is now publicly available for TPUs – Google is proud to announce TorchTPU, native PyTorch for TPU developers, enabling developers to deploy models on TPUs with minimal code changes and access popular ecosystem projects (vLLM, SGLang, Ray, LLM-d).Extending Inductor for the IBM Spyre Accelerator – In a recent blog, IBM’s AI-native Spyre software stack extends PyTorch’s Inductor compiler and native runtime, reducing Spyre-specific compiler code by 7x while maintaining performance parity on tested workloads. AI-assisted development enabled support for thousands of models with just 44 adapters and approximately 10,000 lines of code, complemented by hardware-agnostic vLLM integration and continuous testing against upstream PyTorch updates.A new case study in which Shopify built a continual learning loop with PyTorch and vLLM – Using a continual learning loop with PyTorch and vLLM, Shopify compresses production failures into model weights every day, beating frontier-model quality, and cutting serving costs by 96%.

The open source community is gathering in San Jose for PyTorch Conference North America this week. From bare-metal infrastructure to applications and agents, the conference covers the entire AI stack, exploring the interconnected system building AI in the open. The foundation brings together practitioners focused on training, inference, kernel engineering, and responsible AI work, creating a hub for the future of open intelligence.

To learn more about the next breakthrough in open source AI, visit https://pytorch.org/foundation.

Supporting Quotes

“Lablup has built Backend.AI as an open-source project from the beginning, and PyTorch workloads run on our platform every day. We have benefited greatly from the PyTorch ecosystem over the years. Joining the PyTorch Foundation is our way of supporting the community that has helped us grow and contributing what we have learned from operating AI infrastructure at scale.”
– Jeongkyu Shin, Co-founder and CEO, Lablup Inc.

“Efficient inference is essential to making AI accessible at global scale, and we believe the infrastructure behind it must be open. PyTorch brings developers, researchers, and hardware innovators together around a shared foundation. Joining the PyTorch Foundation allows us to contribute directly to that ecosystem and help turn advances in models and hardware into practical improvements in performance, cost, and accessibility for the next generation of AI applications.”
– Yineng Zhang, President and Governing Board, LightSeek Foundation

“At Nebius, we believe the future of AI depends on a strong, connected ecosystem, from training to deployment. Joining the PyTorch Foundation as a Platinum member allows us to collaborate more deeply with the community and contribute our expertise in high-performance infrastructure and applied AI. Together, we can help developers and enterprises move more easily from experimentation to production and scale their AI applications.”
– Ryan Hanrui Wang, Senior Vice President, Applied AI, Nebius

“Most infrastructure providers treat the framework and the data center as two separate problems. We treat them as one. PyTorch has remained the base layer of AI because it kept the Pythonic style researchers know, while getting serious about performance. Ray, also part of the PyTorch Foundation, does something different: getting that work to run across thousands of GPUs. With Anyscale, the creators of Ray, set to join Nscale, we’re not just using that ecosystem, we’re building the infrastructure underneath it. Joining the PyTorch Foundation as a Platinum member is us backing that directly, not just benefiting from it.”
– Nick Jones, VP of Cloud Native Platform Engineering, Nscale

About the PyTorch Foundation
The PyTorch Foundation is the vendor-neutral home for the open source intelligence layer developers use for training, optimizing, serving, and running models on any chip in any cloud for any agent. As a community-driven hub hosted by the Linux Foundation, the PyTorch Foundation supports the core PyTorch framework alongside a growing portfolio of innovative projects including vLLM, DeepSpeed, Ray, Helion, and Safetensors. Through open governance, strategic support, and a global contributor community, the PyTorch Foundation empowers developers, researchers, and enterprises to build and deploy AI at scale. Learn more at https://pytorch.org/foundation. 

About the Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, hardware, standards, and data. Linux Foundation projects, including Linux, Kubernetes, Model Context Protocol (MCP), OpenChain, OpenSearch, OpenSSF, OpenStack, PyTorch, Ray, RISC-V, SPDX and Zephyr, provide the foundation for global infrastructure. The Linux Foundation is focused on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Media Contact
The Linux Foundation
pr@linuxfoundation.org 

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/pytorch-foundation-welcomes-nine-new-members-as-momentum-builds-around-open-source-ai-center-of-gravity-302914332.html

SOURCE PyTorch Foundation

Firm offers a public window into its internal AI Marketplace of 600+ employee-built solutions and announces AI education partnership with the Mark Cuban Foundation.

CHICAGO, Oct. 20, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — West Monroe, an AI-native global consulting firm, is marking its third annual Innovation Week by showcasing how employee-led innovation is transforming the way the firm works, creating measurable value for clients, and inspiring the next generation of AI builders.  

Taking place October 19–23, the week brings employees and leaders together to share innovations, collaborate on new ideas, and explore opportunities to turn promising solutions into lasting business value. The weeklong event reflects the firm’s broader approach to innovation: giving all employees the tools, resources, and opportunities to build solutions that can be scaled within the organization and for clients.

Giving the Public a Window into Employee-Led AI Innovation

For the first time, West Monroe is giving the public a look inside its internal AI Marketplace, a centralized collection of employee-created AI applications, super prompts, skills, demos, and other solutions.

West Monroe encourages everyone, regardless of technical background, to build with AI. The firm makes most of its AI tools, including Codex and Google AI Studio, available to all employees across the firm, empowering them to create their own solutions. Employees can then submit their innovations to the AI Marketplace, where approved solutions become available for others to discover, use, and build upon—saving time, sparking inspiration, and eliminating duplicative rework.

Examples of select applications featured in the public-facing experience include:

Prompt Clarity Coach: Guides users through a three-step process to turn new ideas into clearer, more effective AI prompts, helping them get better results from AI tools.Professional Development Planner: Helps people identify career goals, explore opportunities to develop new skills, and create personalized, actionable plans for professional growth.Restaurant Menu Insights Demo: Based on a demo developed for a client, this application analyzes restaurant menus to identify ingredient opportunities and product substitutions, connecting menu items to opportunities for growth, greater operational efficiency, consistency, and improved margins.

Additionally, the firm has mobilized a community of advanced AI builders, now representing 15% of West Monroe’s workforce. The Builder Community develops delivery assets and reimagines how the firm serves clients through AI.

“The people closest to the work often have the best ideas about how to make it better, and AI is making it possible for everyone, technical or not, to bring those ideas to life as tools and apps,” said Bret Greenstein, Chief AI Officer at West Monroe. “We’ve given our people the freedom to solve problems themselves, and they’ve built more than 600 solutions and counting to improve how we work and deliver value to clients. This is what being AI-native actually looks like: people at every level using AI to rethink how work gets done, sharing what they’ve created, and making the entire organization better.”

The public-facing experience builds on the June launch of westmonroe.ai, the firm’s public platform offering business leaders access to AI agents that help tackle strategic challenges, from assessing business model risks to evaluating AI readiness and talent strategies.

The firm’s internal AI Marketplace has already been featured in Business Insider and CIO.com.

Turning Employee Innovation into Business Value

Innovation Week also provides an opportunity for West Monroe employees to collaborate and turn ideas into practical solutions through the firm’s innovation competitions.

This year’s Innovation Week competition challenges teams to develop more effective ways of advancing the firm’s growing portfolio of technology assets, including how enhancements are prioritized, ownership is established, user experiences are improved, and feedback is incorporated. Participating teams will demonstrate approaches to help West Monroe scale promising solutions and continuously improve the value they deliver.

The competition has a track record of producing commercially successful solutions. During West Monroe’s 2024 Innovation Week, a team developed a prototype that became Intellio® Hopper, an AI-powered data modernization solution that reduces the time required to convert data for platforms like Databricks by 80%. Since its inception, the solution has generated about $50 million in sales.

“Some of our most valuable solutions started with employees seeing a problem and deciding there had to be a better way to solve it,” said John Rosato, Head of Technology at West Monroe, who is serving as a sponsor and judge for the Innovation Week competition. “Assets are a big part of how West Monroe is different and delivers faster, better results for clients. They allow us to take our expertise and turn it into something repeatable and scalable, which is why this innovation challenge is about investing in their acceleration.”

Finalists will present live demonstrations at the conclusion of Innovation Week, with winners receiving cash prizes.

Investing in the Next Generation of AI Builders

West Monroe is also extending its commitment to making AI innovation widely accessible through a partnership with the Mark Cuban Foundation.

The firm will host AI bootcamps for high school students this fall, which will introduce students to AI tools, ethics, and real-world applications through hands-on activities and a final capstone project. The Mark Cuban Foundation provides the curriculum and technology resources, while West Monroe hosts the program and provides employee volunteers as mentors.

“As AI continues to become an undeniable force in all of our lives, it’s crucial that we open the door to this knowledge, especially to young people who want to explore it,” said Mark Cuban, Founder of the Mark Cuban Foundation. “While technology expands and becomes more advanced, it becomes more critical that we ensure our students are prepared when they apply for schools or jobs in the future. Thanks to our work with West Monroe, the bootcamp will offer an avenue to explore this fascinating field of technology to any student, no matter their means.”

The partnership supports West Monroe’s mission to build the next generation of leaders and reflects the firm’s belief that the ability to understand, use, and build with AI should extend beyond traditional technical roles and backgrounds.

West Monroe’s commitment to AI innovation has earned significant industry recognition in 2026. The firm was named Overall AI Consulting Firm of the Year by the AI Breakthrough Awards, received a Gold Stevie® Award for AI-Driven Culture of Innovation at the Stevies American Business Awards, and was recognized by Forbes as one of America’s Best Management Consulting Firms, including for its AI consulting capabilities. Chief AI Officer Bret Greenstein was also named an AI Leader of the Year in the Stevie Awards.

For more information and to explore West Monroe’s public AI Marketplace preview, visit westmonroe.ai/ai-marketplace.

About West Monroe

West Monroe is an AI-native global consulting firm built for today’s pace of change. We combine deep industry expertise with modern technology and business transformation capabilities to help organizations move faster and deliver measurable impact with speed to value and certainty of results through execution excellence. We don’t just talk about what’s possible—we apply AI and technology where it matters most, pairing strategic insights with hands-on execution to help clients move from strategy to results, faster.

Clients tell us we show up differently. Our employee ownership model fuels an all-in approach grounded in practical execution, measurable impact, and lasting partnership. That commitment has earned recognition from Forbes and Business Insider and made West Monroe one of only 22 companies recognized worldwide for building high-quality careers.

See what’s possible at westmonroe.com.

Media Inquiries

Christina Galoozis

Director, Communications & Public Relations

cgaloozis@westmonroe.com

847-302-1762

Shira Cohen

Manager, Public Relations

scohen@westmonroe.com

443-841-6879

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/west-monroe-marks-third-annual-innovation-week-by-showcasing-employee-built-ai-solutions-and-investing-in-future-innovators-302914079.html

SOURCE West Monroe

Identity-verified, location-validated, time-limited release closes the gap between carrier assignment and physical handoff; full rollout across the Carpool network by year-end

ATLANTA, Oct. 20, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Carpool Logistics, the vehicle logistics platform for dealerships, auctions, fleets, and OEMs, today announced the rollout of Carpass™, a patent-pending secure vehicle release system that ties every release to a verified driver, a validated pickup location, and a time-limited digital credential. Carpass joins carrier vetting, live GPS tracking, geo-tagged inspection photos, account-takeover monitoring, and role-based access controls in Carpool’s layered defense against fraud. It is rolling out across the Carpool network now, will be fully deployed by the end of 2026, and is included at no additional cost on every Carpool shipment.

A gate pass clears the vehicle. It does not clear the driver. Paper gate passes get forwarded, screenshots get reused, and at most dealerships a porter hands keys to whoever arrives with the right name. That gap between carrier assignment and physical handoff is where fraud, theft, and disputes live.

Carpass closes it. Before a vehicle is released, the driver’s identity must be verified against a government-issued ID and a live face match, the driver must be inside the pickup geofence, and the release credential must be active and unexpired. If any one fails, the vehicle does not move. At auctions, Carpass validates the driver against the existing gate pass. At dealerships, it creates a documented handoff where none existed.

“We’re in the trust business. A customer hands us a vehicle and expects it to leave the lot with the driver we assigned, not someone holding a forwarded gate pass,” said Mike Malakhov, Co-Founder and CEO of Carpool Logistics. “Carpass is how we prove that at the gate. We’re including it on every shipment because that trust shouldn’t cost extra.”

First-time drivers complete a one-time identity verification in the Carpool driver app. Once verified and inside the pickup radius, they receive the vehicle release details and a time-limited, encrypted QR code. Gate staff scan it with any smartphone camera, no app or login required, and see the driver’s verified name, photo, company, DOT number, and assigned vehicles. Codes cannot be screenshotted, forwarded, or reused, and every verification attempt and release is logged in a complete audit trail. The system also protects drivers from unauthorized use of their DOT numbers and identities and has already stopped attempted fraud during its pilot phase.

“Carpass runs on one rule: verify the driver, confirm the location, and enforce the time limit at the same moment, or the vehicle doesn’t move,” said Joe Norton, VP of Product at Carpool Logistics. “Every layer of the system, from the encrypted release codes to the geofence to the biometric match, exists because a gate pass clears the vehicle, not the person driving it away.”

Carpass requires no additional hardware or software for shippers or gate staff. Carpool has filed a patent application covering its multi-factor verification architecture. For more information, visit https://www.carpoollogistics.com/carpass.

About Carpool Logistics

Carpool Logistics is a vehicle logistics platform that moves cars for dealerships, auctions, fleets, and OEMs. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in Atlanta, Carpool runs pricing, dispatch, tracking, and documentation in a single proprietary platform built for vehicles, with every shipment executed by one of more than 13,000 vetted carriers, tracked in real time, and documented at the VIN level. Carpool has delivered more than 450,000 vehicles, including 210,000+ in the past twelve months, with a 99.8% claim-free rate in 2025. Learn more at www.carpoollogistics.com.

Media Contact:
Austin Bryan
Head of Marketing, Carpool Logistics
austin.bryan@carpoollogistics.com
(404) 666-7136

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/carpool-logistics-rolls-out-carpass-a-patent-pending-secure-vehicle-release-system-at-no-additional-cost-on-every-shipment-302914356.html

SOURCE Carpool Logistics