> The ONNX runtime seems to be the only really valuable part. I actually disagree. :) If all we had was bindings for ONNX, then we would have to tie ourselves

> The ONNX runtime seems to be the only really valuable part. I actually disagree. :) If all we had was bindings for ONNX, then we would have to tie ourselves to a single format (and potentially a single runtime). However, having ONNX built on top of a solid foundation (Axon), we get more flexibility and solidity to handle the moving ML landscape. As an example, I would actually prefer to load pre-trained models from Hugging Face directly into Axon and bypass ONNX altogether. The most immediate benefit for an Elixir developer is that they don't need Python on their machine for the ONNX conversion. But it also means that I can slightly tweak pre-trained models too. And that's another win. Perhaps your point is that nobody will train a neural network from scratch in Elixir, and maybe that's true, but I would be wary of looking at ONNX as the only possible outcome of the work done so far. Indeed there is an associated high risk to new efforts like this but that's often part of creating something new. I have heard countless times that there is no value in creating a new programming language, until the value was suddenly there.