Ali Taha, engineer at Baseten, discusses hardware evolution with Shawn Wang and Philip Kiely, arguing that GPUs are incorporating specialized tensor operations and memory accelerators.
“How can you look at this trend and then still be bullish on companies that are coming up with Asics for AI.”
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More from Ali Taha
Disclosure
GLM-5.2 autonomously wrote and guided production GPU kernels for Baseten's inference engine
“Some of the GPU kernels that were on GLM-Five-two within our inference engine is written by GLM-Five-two. And the trace and the kernels were guided by GLM-Five-two as the driver.”
Ali TahaAug 3, 2026▶ 1:34:09Next 100x in AI: Inference, Networking, & Self-Optimizing Models — Philip Kiely & Ali Taha, Baseten
Insight
Quantizing more layers can actually improve model fidelity via error cancellation
“It is possible that the model in which I quantized more information is going to perform better because the quantization errors have canceled out. And so what Joshua showed in his mathematical proof where he had like a verifier in is that you can predict which …”
Ali TahaAug 3, 2026▶ 31:54Next 100x in AI: Inference, Networking, & Self-Optimizing Models — Philip Kiely & Ali Taha, Baseten
Insight
Optimal inference parallelism cannot be mathematically calculated; it must be auto-tuned
“And with training, it's more of like a math, like you can run the math and see the flops and maximize it. With inference, it's more of like an auto-tuning, like GPU kernel auto-tuning... You shadow the same traffic, like real traffic, and you just see which co…”
Ali TahaAug 3, 2026▶ 56:06Next 100x in AI: Inference, Networking, & Self-Optimizing Models — Philip Kiely & Ali Taha, Baseten
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Companies developing fused mega kernels rarely run them in production
“Even the companies that have worked at or people that have spoken to who work at companies that do fused mega kernels, they, Very, very often don't end up running those in production because the TRTL and modular kernels that will launch are faster because you …”
Ali TahaAug 3, 2026▶ 58:38Next 100x in AI: Inference, Networking, & Self-Optimizing Models — Philip Kiely & Ali Taha, Baseten
PredictionNot checkable as stated
NVIDIA's Vera Rubin GPU architecture effectively renders mega kernel research obsolete
“The GPU is, is It's designed in such a way that it basically kills megakernels. You don't need to use megakernels that much anymore. So it seems like that entire research field goes into, like, won't be continued, but yeah.”
Ali TahaAug 3, 2026▶ 59:20Next 100x in AI: Inference, Networking, & Self-Optimizing Models — Philip Kiely & Ali Taha, Baseten
Opinion
Open-source LLMs have reached closed parity, but video models lag far behind
“The difference between the best open source LLM and the best open closed source LLM is very small. Like it used to be six months. I don't think it's six months anymore. I think it's like basically almost unparative. Video models are definitely not, there's a h…”
Ali TahaAug 3, 2026▶ 1:14:57Next 100x in AI: Inference, Networking, & Self-Optimizing Models — Philip Kiely & Ali Taha, Baseten
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