For some reason the author thinks that skills you learn developing in PyTorch will go away if Facebook does. Wouldn’t the open source community just fork the source or develop a new framework? It’s not like backprop will stop working.
"Perhaps the communities who've invested in becoming experts in Pytorch and Tensorflow will wrestle them away from their corporate masters and make them generally useful. Certainly, a lot of people will have gained skills in applying statistical techniques."
It's not just about PyTorch, but the whole ecosystem (code, cloud, and data) that these tools depend on to work, and what happens when they get integrated into an economy then disappear.
The author is Cory Doctorow, who has a very good intuition about these kinds of issues. His presentations about open source and the war on general purpose computing are very important and prescient.