> huge company with lots of money... [yet] management that thinks two different C++ ML frameworks with the same goals is a good idea I don't see a contradictio

> huge company with lots of money... [yet] management that thinks two different C++ ML frameworks with the same goals is a good idea I don't see a contradiction here, in fact it makes sense. You have some goals, and a couple of promising approaches. It's hard to say which will work better, but there's enough budget and people to work on them to just try them both and see. I've heard anecdotes of similar strategies at banks, who have sufficient budget to hire two parallel teams to build literally the same product, sometimes without even knowing about each other. At the end, the one that ends up being faster/better gets used. I guess it's like a microcosm of free market competition within an org, as opposed to top down planning.