4 ms·

Modular Raises $100M

29 points by hasheddan 3y ago

falcor84 3y ago
The other big part of this press release is the local availability of Mojo: We are also excited to announce the next major step forward for Mojo – the ability to download Mojo and a whole developer toolset locally to your desktop machine. The ability to run Mojo locally is the most requested feature from Mojo developers so far and will lead to increased innovation and collaboration in the Mojo developer ecosystem. We are shipping a preview of the Mojo SDK to hundreds of early adopters today, and we will release it generally to everyone in early September. Sign up to download [0]. [0] https://www.modular.com/ https://www.modular.com/
- frfl 3y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but the plan is to open source Mojo right? Is there a particular reason it's not open source from the start?
  - samuell 3y ago
    Yep: > Looking ahead, we are committed to releasing the Mojo standard library in open source and accepting contributions before the end of the year.
    - frfl 3y ago
      "releasing the Mojo standard library in open source" that doesn't say compiler or tooling, just standard library. Anyway, I found the FAQ section and the relevant bits --- Will Mojo be open-sourced? Yes, we expect that Mojo will be open-sourced. However, Mojo is still young, so we will continue to incubate it within Modular until more of its internal architecture is fleshed out. We don’t have an established plan for open-sourcing yet. Why not develop Mojo in the open from the beginning? Why not develop Mojo in the open from the beginning? Mojo is a big project and has several architectural differences from previous languages. We believe a tight-knit group of engineers with a common vision can move faster than a community effort. This development approach is also well-established from other projects that are now open source (such as LLVM, Clang, Swift, MLIR, etc.).
ashvardanian 3y ago
Congratulations to Chris Lattner and the broader Mojo team!
tempusalaria 3y ago
Quick q for current users - I never bothered with this because their speed-up claim vs python on front page is so ridiculous I just stopped there - it’s easy to write 2 lines of numpy to do something 100,000x faster than python does it. And that claim is still on the front page. So my question for users is - what can you actually do in this better than PyTorch or numpy? Interested in exploring it if there is anything worth bothering with. For example, do they present any problems with highly optimised numpy/torch solutions and show how modular does it better?
- pierrefermat1 3y ago
  You're right the scummy marketing is such a turnoff it's not worth even looking into
- bookmark1231 3y ago
  [dead]
TradingPlaces 3y ago
I look at that inference engine as the most plausible current candidate for Nvidia AI moat drainer.
- dandiep 3y ago
  Can you elaborate on this? Would love to understand how that would play out.
  - TradingPlaces 3y ago
    My view is that software is Nvidia’s moat. There is plenty of hardware that can do all this stuff cheaper, and more coming in the next couple of years. That’s not the issue. The issue is that strong hardware-software link that Nvidia has. The promise of the engine is the same as Lattner’s LLVM was for compilers: train on the back end of your choice, and run it on the front end of your choice. It is modular. That breaks the hardware-software link. https://www.modular.com/engine https://www.modular.com/engine Scroll down to the first flow chart. Note how they stuck Nvidia over to the bottom-right. That was intentional. ARM, the cheapest data center CPU hardware and the most prevalent at the edge, is in the middle. They launched with CPU support first, now doing GPUs. The main dividing line in LLMs and other large models is becoming giant commercial models running on GPU cloud vs open source at the edge or CPU cloud.
Archit3ch 3y ago
Will Mojo-the-MLIR-compiler be available for use without Mojo-the-language (e.g. with other LLVM languages)?
gkass 3y ago
“ In the four months since our product keynote, the Modular community has grown to more than 120K+ developers (including tens of thousands of enterprises) who are excited to utilize our AI infrastructure stack.” What? Pretty sure you don’t have 20K enterprise customers.

29 points by hasheddan 3y ago

The other big part of this press release is the local availability of Mojo: We are also excited to announce the next major step forward for Mojo – the ability to download Mojo and a whole developer toolset locally to your desktop machine. The ability to run Mojo locally is the most requested feature from Mojo developers so far and will lead to increased innovation and collaboration in the Mojo developer ecosystem. We are shipping a preview of the Mojo SDK to hundreds of early adopters today, and we will release it generally to everyone in early September. Sign up to download [0]. [0] https://www.modular.com/ https://www.modular.com/

frfl 3y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the plan is to open source Mojo right? Is there a particular reason it's not open source from the start?
- samuell 3y ago
  Yep: > Looking ahead, we are committed to releasing the Mojo standard library in open source and accepting contributions before the end of the year.
  - frfl 3y ago
    "releasing the Mojo standard library in open source" that doesn't say compiler or tooling, just standard library. Anyway, I found the FAQ section and the relevant bits --- Will Mojo be open-sourced? Yes, we expect that Mojo will be open-sourced. However, Mojo is still young, so we will continue to incubate it within Modular until more of its internal architecture is fleshed out. We don’t have an established plan for open-sourcing yet. Why not develop Mojo in the open from the beginning? Why not develop Mojo in the open from the beginning? Mojo is a big project and has several architectural differences from previous languages. We believe a tight-knit group of engineers with a common vision can move faster than a community effort. This development approach is also well-established from other projects that are now open source (such as LLVM, Clang, Swift, MLIR, etc.).

ashvardanian 3y ago

Congratulations to Chris Lattner and the broader Mojo team!

tempusalaria 3y ago

Quick q for current users - I never bothered with this because their speed-up claim vs python on front page is so ridiculous I just stopped there - it’s easy to write 2 lines of numpy to do something 100,000x faster than python does it. And that claim is still on the front page. So my question for users is - what can you actually do in this better than PyTorch or numpy? Interested in exploring it if there is anything worth bothering with. For example, do they present any problems with highly optimised numpy/torch solutions and show how modular does it better?

pierrefermat1 3y ago
You're right the scummy marketing is such a turnoff it's not worth even looking into
bookmark1231 3y ago
[dead]

TradingPlaces 3y ago

I look at that inference engine as the most plausible current candidate for Nvidia AI moat drainer.

dandiep 3y ago
Can you elaborate on this? Would love to understand how that would play out.
- TradingPlaces 3y ago
  My view is that software is Nvidia’s moat. There is plenty of hardware that can do all this stuff cheaper, and more coming in the next couple of years. That’s not the issue. The issue is that strong hardware-software link that Nvidia has. The promise of the engine is the same as Lattner’s LLVM was for compilers: train on the back end of your choice, and run it on the front end of your choice. It is modular. That breaks the hardware-software link. https://www.modular.com/engine https://www.modular.com/engine Scroll down to the first flow chart. Note how they stuck Nvidia over to the bottom-right. That was intentional. ARM, the cheapest data center CPU hardware and the most prevalent at the edge, is in the middle. They launched with CPU support first, now doing GPUs. The main dividing line in LLMs and other large models is becoming giant commercial models running on GPU cloud vs open source at the edge or CPU cloud.

Archit3ch 3y ago

Will Mojo-the-MLIR-compiler be available for use without Mojo-the-language (e.g. with other LLVM languages)?

gkass 3y ago

“ In the four months since our product keynote, the Modular community has grown to more than 120K+ developers (including tens of thousands of enterprises) who are excited to utilize our AI infrastructure stack.” What? Pretty sure you don’t have 20K enterprise customers.