The Neuron: AI Explained The "Android Moment" for AI Infrastructure: Why Modular Just Raised $250M
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Nov 26, 2025 Tim Davis, Co-founder and President of Modular and former Google Brain engineer, dives into the revolution in AI infrastructure that his company is spearheading. He discusses the challenges of AI being tied to costly, vendor-specific hardware and introduces Modular's approach to creating a flexible compute layer. Tim highlights the impressive 70-80% cost reductions businesses can achieve and the need for a unified software stack to boost hardware competition. He also shares insights on modular programming and the importance of low-latency inference for real-world applications.
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Three Stacks At Google Motivated Modular
- At Google they operated three full software stacks for TPU, CPU/GPU, and edge devices.
- That fragmentation motivated Tim Davis and Chris Lattner to pursue a unified compute layer.
Developers Don’t Love Hardware
- Most developers care about throughput, latency, accuracy, and cost, not hardware specifics.
- Hardware should be an output that meets those requirements, not a developer's primary concern.
Training ≠ Instant Production
- Deploying models everywhere requires heavy engineering beyond training.
- "What you train is what you serve" rarely holds true today without extra infrastructure.