Hello there,
I have been using Pyro for the last 1 year and noticed that there has not been a new release since June 01, 2024. I noticed that most of the newer (>2022) posts are explicitly for Numpyro with very few if any devoted for Pyro. Even though I have been using Pyro for one year, I am still trying to learn it but some of the tutorials refer to methods and functions present in previous Pyro releases but not newer ones. Moreover, I feel that the documentation needs improvement. For instance, the class Predictive is referred to as being experimental in the documentation. After 2 years of development one will hope that these experimental features will have become permanent and free of bugs. So this has made me wonder is Pyro still being developed and maintained or has everyone switched to Numpyro?
yes, we’re still trying our best to maintain pyro. but the core maintainers are pretty busy with other things, so it’s been a bit of a challenge. certainly we should aim to do another release. hopefully i can find some time to do that sooner rather than later, tbd. we rely on the community for any additional improvements, whether it’s new features or better docs, so please feel empowered to help contribute to the codebase.
it’s a bit difficult to say whether more people are using pyro or numpyro, since most of our users are pretty invisible to us unless they are active on this forum or on github. certainly we’ve seen more active development of new features on the numpyro end. importantly, we’ve had a number of contributors step up and play a larger role in maintaining and developing numpyro: @qazalbash @juanitorduz @tillahoffmann and others. so it’s in large part thanks to them that numpyro has seen more activity these days. also @fehiepsi continues to do a great job of helping to keep the lights on, reviewing pull requests, etc.
like any open source project pyro/numpyro are critically dependent on the broader community, so the degree to which the project continues to be maintained and developed will in large part be determined by community engagement : )