(Yicai Global) Sept. 27 -- Facebook and Alibaba Group Holding are joining hands so that developers can use the US social media firm's PyTorch deep learning framework together with the Chinese tech giant's platform for machine learning in the cloud.

The pair announced their partnership on the open-source deep learning framework and Alibaba Cloud's Machine Learning Platform for AI at the Apsara Conference yesterday, The Paper reported. Held in Alibaba's hometown of Hangzhou, the conference is the firm's biggest annual technology event.

Facebook made PyTorch's source code accessible to all in 2017 in order to encourage developers to apply the technology to their deep learning models. Since then, it has become one of the world's most popular deep learning frameworks. Alibaba Cloud's Machine Learning Platform for AI offers developers algorithms to help them with data mining and analysis.

The cooperation will further expand the influence of PyTorch within the Chinese research and engineering community because of Alibaba Cloud's vast developer ecosystem, said Bill Jia, Facebook's vice president of infrastructure.

Editor: Emmi Laine