Comment by vonnik

Gluon is an attempt by Microsoft and Amazon to regain some influence in AI tools. Keras looked like it was going to become the standard high-level API, but now Theano is dead, and CNTK and MxNet are controlled by Google's rivals, and they're ganging up against Google's tools. Francois Chollet is committed to keeping Keras neutral, but he's still a Google engineer, and that probably makes Microsoft and Amazon nervous. This is the equivalent of Microsoft creating C# in response to Java. The company that controls the API, has enormous influence on the ecosystem built atop the API, just like Google has had with Android, or MSFT with Windows. MSFT and AMZN are carving out their own user base, or trying to, at the price of fragmenting the Python community.