"Cofounders Chris Lattner and Tim Davis have spent decades building the software plumbing that sits beneath the modern tech industry. Lattner is famous for creating Apple's Swift programming language. He also built the software underpinning Google's TPU AI chips, with Modular cofounder Tim Davis. They're now aiming that expertise at CUDA itself. The attempt borders on madness, but it's the kind of audacious project that could transform the AI industry."
"CUDA began life almost 20 years ago as a way to make graphics chips programmable. Today, it has grown into a multilayered software ecosystem - language, libraries, compilers, inference systems - that most AI companies rely on. That success comes at a cost: Most of the industry is now optimized around a single vendor's hardware. CUDA binds AI workloads to Nvidia GPUs. That is great for Nvidia, but deeply limiting for everyone else."
Modular is a startup led by Chris Lattner and Tim Davis aimed at unseating Nvidia's CUDA as the dominant AI software stack. Lattner created Apple's Swift and helped build software for Google's TPU chips; Davis also contributed to TPU software. CUDA started as a way to program graphics chips and evolved into a multilayered ecosystem of languages, libraries, compilers and inference systems that most AI companies rely on. That centralization optimizes workloads for Nvidia GPUs but creates vendor lock-in. Alternative chips exist, but each vendor supplies its own software stack, fragmenting the ecosystem and making portability difficult.
Read at Business Insider
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