I mean partial derivatives aren't that complicated if you know normal derivatives, which most people do. And backpropagation isn't too difficult either.

The value of PyTorch lies more in utilizing accelerators like GPUs while offering a nice abstraction. But you can build your own (inefficient) tensor library without too much effort as e.g. Andrej Karpathy has shown in his "NN zero to hero" youtube series.

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breezybottom a day ago | parent [-]

I hope you don't actually believe that most people know derivatives.

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farresito 19 hours ago | parent [-]

I would hope most people do. It's in pretty much every high school curriculum, isn't it?

	▲	breezybottom 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Not in the United States at least. It's only something you would need if you went on to college anyway.
	▲	legobmw99 12 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I attended one of the better (read: top ~200) public high schools in the US, and you could graduate without even taking trigonometry
	▲	maleldil 17 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		https://xkcd.com/2501/ Even if most people had calculus in high school (which is not a given), I'd expect pretty much anyone who did not go into STEM to promptly forget it, just like I forgot much from chemistry and biology after studying Computer Science.