Facebook Inc. today launched a developer preview of its long-awaited PyTorch artificial intelligence software framework, which helps accelerate the deployment of AI-based applications. Announced in May, PyTorch was created by Facebook's AI research group as a machine learning library of functions for the programming language Python. It's primarily designed for use with deep learning, which is a branch of machine learning that attempts to emulate the way the human brain functions, and has led to major breakthroughs in areas such as language translation, image and voice recognition. PyTorch is supposed to help speed up the development of these kinds of AI capabilities, and has previously been used to build more realistic avatars for Facebook's Oculus virtual reality headset. Researchers at UC Berkeley have also used PyTorch to speed up their work on image-to-image transformation, for example.