There is often a lot of work that has to be done before and after PyTorch gets involved. For example the code I'm working on right now involves reading and parsing a bunch of files, filtering and extracting a bunch of data based on various criteria, formatting that data, passing it to a PyTorch model and then taking the results from PyTorch, validating it, reformatting it and then writing it to disk. The PyTorch part is probably as fast as it can get, but most of the overall runtime is spent doing all that other stuff and if you can speed that up then that is a clear win in many cases.
