The Ledger
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Lattner: Modular MAX is 'more open source' than vLLM
“This thing's more open source than VLM because VLM depends on all these crazy binary CUDA kernels and stuff like this that are just opaque blobs from NVIDIA, right?”
Lattner says C++ 'sucks' for modern accelerated compute
“Let me be the first to tell you, and I can say this now, I feel comfortable saying this, that C++ sucks.”
Lattner calls vLLM a 'hot mess' due to too many stakeholders
“VLM seems much more like a massive community with a lot of stakeholders, a lot of stuff going on, and it's kind of a hot mess.”
Lattner says Mojo is 10,000x faster than Python and beats Rust
“Mojo is not just a little faster than Python, it's faster than Rust. So it's like tens of thousands of times faster than Python, and it's in the Python family.”
Modular's Mojo FlashAttention beats Tri Dao's reference implementation
“We're beating the tree DAO reference implementation that everybody uses, for example, right? Written fully in Mojo. Again, all of our, GPU kernels are written in Mojo. You can go see the history of the team building this, and it was done in just a few weeks, r…”
PyTorch democratized model training, but AI inference remains undemocratized
“And so things like PyTorch came on the scene and I think PyTorch gets all credit for democratizing model training, right? It's taught to pretty much every computer science student that graduates. That's a huge deal, but nobody democratized inference. Inference…”
Modular completely eliminates and replaces NVIDIA's CUDA stack
“In the case of Modular, we go literally, like, we only work at that level, because we get rid of all of CUDA, right? And so we've replaced the entire stack, and so we only do that.”
DeepSeek's open releases pulled global AI progress forward by six months
“But I think that what it did is it pulled forward progress in AI by like six months.”
An industry-leading state-of-the-art AI model may launch on MAX soon
“We may have an industry leading state of the art model launching first on Mac soon.”
NVIDIA Blackwell is not backward-compatible with Hopper kernels
“Well, so it's not widely known, but Blackwell is not compatible with Hopper. Hopper kernels don't always run on Blackwell, for example.”
AI training scales with research teams; inference scales with customer base
“Training scales the size of your research team. Inference scales the size of your customer base.”
AI coding assistants excel at boilerplate, not inventing new algorithms
“People within the company are dabbling with cloud code and some of the stuff, and so I don't have personal experience with that, but for me, I found that it's mostly, it is very useful, but it's really about boilerplate, and so it's not about inventing new alg…”
Alternative AI stacks must match state-of-the-art performance to be useful
“Building An alternate AI stack that is not as good as the existing one isn't very useful because people will always evaluate it against state of the art.”
Modular will soon launch support for AMD MI300 and MI325 GPUs
“We're about to launch our AMD and my 303 25 support. That'll be a big deal for the industry.”
First-time Mojo developers built a GPU training system in one day
“The winning team for the hackathon took that four person team. And one day they had not used Mojo before they hadn't programmed GPUs before. And they had built a training system. They wrote an atom optimizer, a bunch of training kernels. They built a simple ba…”
Modular beat Intel MKL matrix multiplication speed in its first year
“First year was prove compilation philosophy. And so this was writing very abstract compiler stuff. And then prove that we can make a matrix multiplication go faster than Intel MKL's matrix multiplication on Intel Silicon and make it configurable and multiple D…”
Intelligent compute routing delivers 5x performance TCO benefit
“You can get like five X performance TCO benefit by doing intelligent routing.”
Modular's Mojo and MAX are free on NVIDIA and CPUs
“The max framework and the mojo language, free to use on NVIDIA and CPUs, any scale, go nuts, do whatever you want.”
CPU latency in KV cache management bottlenecks GPU utilization
“Like your eviction policy runs on a CPU. Like that radix hashing algorithm and block hashing and all that stuff happens like primarily CPU. That's really important for performance because if you have latency in these steps, like you're not keeping your GPU uti…”
Modular monetizes cluster management and support on a per-GPU basis
“If you want cluster management, and you want enterprise support, and you want things like this, then you can pay on a per GPU basis, and you can contact our sales team, and then we can work out a deal, and we can work with you directly.”
Only 250 people knew about Apple's Swift language before its 2014 launch
“Started in 2010, it launched publicly by Apple in 2014, ok? And by the time it launched in 2014, only about 250 people in the world knew about it. Most of whom were in my team, about 200 and something of them were in my team, and then it was senior execs, mark…”