Taming the AI Hardware Cambrian Explosion — Abdul Dakkak, Modular
Compute is booked out for years and new chips keep arriving. The hard part is software that runs well on all of them. Abdul Dakkak, chief scientist at Modular, explains why today's AI software stack is a mess, with vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM and llama.cpp each patching around different hardware, and how Modular rebuilt the stack from the ground up. Mojo is a Pythonic systems language for CPUs, GPUs and accelerators that aims to match CUDA's performance; Modular has open-sourced its kernels, including matmul and attention kernels he says beat the vendor libraries and FlashAttention 4, with Moj…