I run convnet-benchmarks, and also work at Facebook. Unlike what the public perception is, NVIDIA, Facebook and other companies collaborate very very closely.

I run convnet-benchmarks, and also work at Facebook. Unlike what the public perception is, NVIDIA, Facebook and other companies collaborate very very closely. NVIDIA's latest R3 release has FFT-based convolutions inspired by Facebook's work, and Facebook integrated some of the optimization suggestions for fbfft that NVIDIA gave. Further optimizations on the FFT approach (like tiled-FFTs) have been suggested and prototyped at FB and carried over by NVIDIA. The relationship is more of a deep collaborative effort. At the end of the day, we want cuDNN to win, as it is a baseline system for all software. However, if you want to do research, you want to have open-source code, because you often want to do funky changes to the base algorithm. NVIDIA falls short on this, and we at Facebook pledged to always keep our code open source (bitten by the fact that we had to start with closed-source blackboxes for our initial FFT work).