Qualcomm to Acquire Modular (opens in new tab)

It's kind of funny that Modular is getting acquired by a hardware company considering what it's founder has said repeatedly in interviews and articles about how those companies fail to make AI stacks.

* https://www.modular.com/blog/democratizing-ai-compute-part-9...

It's interesting that acquire.fyi data shows tech M&A deal volume is down 11% year to date, but total deal value is up 40%. So, fewer deals are closing in tech, but the deals that are closing are much larger. I wish we had the deal value for this one.

As a meta comment, I'm surprised such a news is not reaching the frontpage already.

Tbh, Modular getting acquired happened sooner than I would have expected, if ever. Don't know how to feel about this one.

Also so many mixed feelings about Mojo, the programming language powering Modular. Of course Chris Lattner is free to pursue whatever he wants, his many contributions to tech will always be highly regarded, but to me it feels as if he "wasted" lots of his precious mental capacity on making Mojo a python-like language instead of trying to come up with something better from first principles. I know, the promise of Mojo eventually being a Python superset has been taken back, which I think is the right move, and I understand why Mojo's initial motivation for being close to Python was to attract ML folks, but I'm getting counterfactual regret just by thinking about what Chris Lattner could have achieved by making a new programming language truly from scratch and not letting some undesireable pythonisms muddy the language.

Anyway, sorry for rambling. Congrats to the team at Modular!

Modular now joins SYCL, OpenCL, and One API on the list of cross platform languages which never really became cross platform.

After so long and so much investment in AI, the best cross-platorm API we've got for high performance Kernels is vulcan, a graphics API. That is sad.

Still, this is pretty good for Modular's employees, probably good for Qualcomm. It's just terribly disappointing for anyone who invested time learning mojo in the hope it might actually become cross platform.

Qualcomm seems to be assembling a whole portfolio of technologies/products aimed at

1. Moving beyond ARM to RISC-V

2. Being competitive for AI/could needs instai of just chips for phones and other edge devices.

Interesting to see bold and high-conviction moves in this direction. Tenstorrent, Modular, Ventana, Alphawave, etc.

Related, Reuters reported the deal a few days ago, valued at $4b: https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/qualcomm-nearing...

Qualcomm has acquired excellent engineering talent here, the infrastructure I've seen Modular build in the 3 years I've followed the company is insane.

I don't get it.

Qualcomm has almost no products in the high-end inference/training market. The industry standard is the NVIDIA Hopper H100/H200.

What could they possibly get from acquiring Modular?

Either this was the plan all along (cashing in on the bubble) or it’s an admission of failure.

Per modular Twitter, the plan is still to open source the mojo compiler this year: https://x.com/Modular/status/2069787078032834635

I honestly think Mojo would be better served if it is just a high-level language for GPU programming that compiles down to PTX with clear Python/Rust interop boundaries instead of trying for the "one language, multiple computational model" thing that they seem to be going for. The programming model between CPU and GPU programming is very different: code that runs best on CPU with heavy branching behaviors should not be written the same way as massively parallel matrix multiplication oriented GPU code, which I think they will be forced to do in the MLIR level anyway.

So, you end up with a language that looks like Python, but doesn't behave like Python, and companies that adopt Mojo early with the promise of Python compatibility may find themselves running into edge cases with difficult to trace compiler error messages that would be nearly impossible to debug, especially with the addition of Zig style `comptime` as their metaprogramming model.

Yesterday, LineShine a supercomputer in China emerges as #1 in the Top500 using ARM v9 based chips and no GPUs. Today, Qualcomm a premier designer of ARMv9 licensed chips in the United States acquires Modular, who has been creating a compiler stack that provides an alternative to NVIDIA's CUDA stack.

Are you ready for Qualcomm ARMv9 powered inference running Mojo/MAX written kernels doing low-cost inference at scale for AI?

Has anyone used mojo/modular extensively in their work? I installed it as soon as it was available but never went past the toy examples.

so the most notoriously patent oriented tech firm is buying this up. lol ;)

good for the founders. also explains why my resume got dropped on the floor as a desk reject :p

Oh, that is unexpected... I tried applying for a position at Modular a few days ago.

latty gotta get his baggy

Welp, I think I can give up on my hope for Mojo.

Wtf? What a joke, but I mean the best way to become a billionaire is convince someone with a billion dollars to give it to you. This is actually insane, wow. I guess Qualcomm is desperate? Nobody was bidding for this, but congrats to the team at modular?! I’m actually salty about this because like I don’t feel like mojo was even good after trying it out.

RIP Modular

Of all possible acquirers, Qualcomm is the worst outcome for Mojo, rip