Chris Lattner

I mean, the programming language is a component of the mission, right?

And the mission is, or not literal, but our joking mission is to save the world from terrible AI software.

Excellent.

Okay.

So, you know, if you look at this mission, you need a syntax.

So, yes, you need a programming language, right?

And, like, we wouldn't have to build the programming language if one existed, right?

So if Python was already good enough, then cool, we've just used it.

We're not just doing very large-scale expensive engineering projects for the sake of it.

It's to solve a problem.

It's also about accelerators.

It's also about exotic numerics and bfloat16 and matrix multiplications and convolutions and this kind of stuff.

Within the stack, there are things like kernel fusion,

That's an esoteric but really important thing that leads to much better performance and much more general research hackability together.

Yeah, so let me take a step back and talk about status quo.

And so if you go back to TensorFlow 1, PyTorch 1, this kind of time frame, and these have all evolved and gotten way more complicated.

So let's go back to the glorious simple days.

These things basically were CPUs and CUDA.

And so what you do is you say, go do a dense layer, and a dense layer has a matrix multiplication in it, right?

And so when you say that, you say, go do this big operation of matrix multiplication, and if it's on a GPU, kick off a CUDA kernel.