Satya Mallick, the CEO of the computer vision library OpenCV, recently announced that OpenCV, Tensorflow and PyTorch were joining forces to form a single entity, OpenFlowTorch. Mallick said that the new combined open-source library had been formed to “maximise happiness.” The only catch: it was posted on April 1st as a joke by Mallick. Thanks to the attention-grabbing headline. The post spread like wildfire and received more than 5,000 likes, and was shared more than 200 times within the past two days.
However, most developers overlooked the date and failed to realise Mallick’s April fool’s joke. Several data scientists started commenting on the post with genuine queries. Mallick was left responding to every comment with the clarification that it was a joke. One commenter asked, “Does this mean ‘importcv2’ will automatically import Tensorflow and PyTorch?” While some others weighed in on the pseudo name, saying, “Good to hear, but didn’t like the name OpenFlowTorch. OpenCV was better.” When an engineer asked if OpenCV would still be available as a separate product, Mallick replied, saying that the last supported version of OpenCV would be released on “April 1st, 2023.”
The IIT-K alumni took the joke a step further by adding that the source code of all three libraries had been stolen by hackers, which had then forced them to unite. Mallick quite possibly himself didn’t expect the post to gain the attention it did as he posted a separate post today spelling out that his previous announcement was bogus. Mallick had even posted a YouTube video from OpenCV’s official account announcing Hindi versions for all OpenCV programming functions as a joke.
