Open Neural Network Exchange

Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX)
Original author(s)	Facebook, Microsoft
Developer(s)	Linux Foundation
Initial release	September 2017; 7 years ago
Stable release	1.16.2 / 1 August 2024; 57 days ago
Repository	github.com/onnx/onnx ;
Written in	C++, Python
Operating system	Windows, Linux
Type	Artificial intelligence ecosystem
License	initially MIT License;; later changed to Apache License 2.0
Website	onnx.ai

The Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) [ˈɒnɪks]^[2] is an open-source artificial intelligence ecosystem^[3] of technology companies and research organizations that establish open standards for representing machine learning algorithms and software tools to promote innovation and collaboration in the AI sector. ONNX is available on GitHub.

History

ONNX was originally named Toffee^[4] and was developed by the PyTorch team at Facebook.^[5] In September 2017 it was renamed to ONNX and announced by Facebook and Microsoft.^[6] Later, IBM, Huawei, Intel, AMD, Arm and Qualcomm announced support for the initiative.^[3]

In October 2017, Microsoft announced that it would add its Cognitive Toolkit and Project Brainwave platform to the initiative.^[3]

In November 2019 ONNX was accepted as graduate project in Linux Foundation AI.^[7]

In October 2020 Zetane Systems became a member of the ONNX ecosystem.^[8]

Intent

The initiative targets:

Framework interoperability

Allow developers to more easily move between frameworks, some of which may be more desirable for specific phases of the development process, such as fast training, network architecture flexibility or inferencing on mobile devices.^[6]

Shared optimization

Allow hardware vendors and others to improve the performance of artificial neural networks of multiple frameworks at once by targeting the ONNX representation.^[6]