joseph gabriel ragoncin
news editor
Shopify joins the PyTorch Foundation as a Platinum member, giving e-commerce companies a seat on the foundation’s board of directors.
This membership connects one of the world’s largest commerce platforms with an open source artificial intelligence group hosted by the Linux Foundation. We will also have Shopify Engineering Manager Shuying Sun on both our Board of Directors and Technical Advisory Board.
Shopify uses machine learning across a variety of products and internal systems. PyTorch is part of the company’s work with Sidekick, the company’s AI assistant for sellers and the search and recommendation tool used by buyers on the platform.
The PyTorch Foundation supports the PyTorch framework and a wide range of open source AI projects, including DeepSpeed, Helion, Ray, Safetensors, and vLLM. The Board of Directors sets policy through the Foundation’s bylaws, mission and vision statement, and defines the scope and technical direction of its efforts.
For Shopify, the decision formalizes a deeper role for software that already relies on applied machine learning. The company plans to provide engineering expertise upstream and share its experience running machine learning systems in retail and commercial environments.
Shopify serves millions of businesses in over 175 countries, from small sellers to global brands. Machine learning is being incorporated into many parts of the business, including new underlying model work tied to product search, recommendations, fraud prevention, and sales tools.
In one of the clearest signs of its strategy, Shopify described AI as a core layer in the evolution of its commerce software. “AI is becoming the operating layer of commerce, and we believe this layer needs to be open to reach global scale,” said Shopify Chief Technology Officer Mikhail Parakin. “PyTorch is at the heart of how Shopify builds AI today. Joining the Foundation allows us to invest directly in that foundation and help shape the foundation for the agent era, rather than just building on top of it.”
The foundation presented the arrival of Shopify as a way to bring more direct input from commercial deployments into governance. This point is important for PyTorch. That’s because the framework is widely used in both research and production, and its backers are seeking broad participation from companies that build and operate AI systems at scale.
Mark Collier, Executive Director of the PyTorch Foundation, said: “Shopify operates in a place where AI meets real buyers and sellers every day, and that advantage is exactly what the Foundation needs as agents become the gateway to commerce.”
Role of the Board of Directors
Sun’s appointment adds an executive with experience in both AI for products and large-scale machine learning infrastructure. At Shopify, I’m on the Foundation Model team, focused on large-scale language models and the company’s commerce model efforts.
Before joining Shopify, Sun led the machine learning foundation platform team at Microsoft Bing & AI, the foundation said. Its background extends beyond modeling to optimizing training and inference, which are central to how models are built and delivered at scale.
PyTorch Foundation Platinum membership includes one board seat. In practice, this gives Shopify a formal voice in decisions regarding governance and technical priorities across the Foundation’s project portfolio.
open source push
The appointment also highlights broader AI trends. Companies that rely heavily on open source frameworks are looking for a more direct role in management. Rather than limiting their involvement to internal deployments, large-scale users are increasingly taking on foundation memberships, board roles, and upstream engineering positions.
This is important for PyTorch because commercial workloads can place different demands on the software than academic or experimental use. For example, retail systems must handle high traffic, recommendations, fraud checks, and customer-facing tools that operate continuously in many markets.
Shopify’s comments suggest it hopes to use its operational experience to help shape the software stack it uses. The goal is to help ensure that PyTorch continues to meet the needs of retail and commercial workloads as AI becomes more deeply embedded in seller-buyer interactions.
The Foundation’s project list shows how its mission has expanded beyond a single framework. Alongside PyTorch itself, this group now houses tools related to model training, inference, and deployment, reflecting the expansion of open source AI into the broader software ecosystem.
Sun has joined the Board of Directors and Technical Advisory Board as part of Shopify’s new position in the organization.
