I dont think big companies like Google react to news like that. Very likely this was meant to go out on Tuesday for weeks now. And it just happened to have coincided with another news.

No, these are two very different objectives.

Yeah they read the news this morning and whipped up a quick Torch->XLA translation layer and coordinated with four different inference engines (who also all wrote their own blog posts) and shoved this out the door quick to stay on top of the news cycle

They do different things and sit in different parts of the stack (training vs inference). TorchTPU seems more like a play to get more people familiar with Googles TPU chips as they want to sell them to people outside of google.

lol no this is a replacement for https://github.com/pytorch/xla